When Durham musician Daniel Levin performs, walls fall—between player and instrument, music and sound, public and private. He’s a big guy who plays a big cello with his whole body, less holding the instrument than locked in a mutual embrace as they move together like dance partners.
He has all the fancy double-stops and string crossings that you’d expect in a trained classical musician, but he will also produce homely squeaks from the wooden body, or strike the end pin on the floor, or cease playing entirely to swish his bow in the air. When he returns to the strings, his eyes will close, his mouth will open, and his head will fall back as he sinks within himself, deeper than we can fully follow. He’s making it up as he goes along.
Levin’s many albums over the last two decades mark him as “one of the [cello’s] most brilliant contemporary practitioners,” according to The Wire, which is like Rolling Stone for people who left conservatory yearning to be free. Lately he’s become a local magnet for this scattered scene, connecting it with others, especially dance.
Besides his own performances, he hosts Sanctuary Series, an intimate salon for local and international musicians, movers, and poets at his home in the East Durham suburbs. The event series grew out of a pandemic collaboration with Duke University and has continued as a nonprofit.
Its 35th edition, on December 7, features a guitarist, a flutist, and two dancers. But with capacity limited and only available by RSVP, a better bet to see Levin perform might be a Shadowbox Studio event on December 11, when Levin will be joined by Duke dance professor Barbara Dickinson.
He also co-leads the roaming Improvisers Lab with dance artist Ginger Wagg, where dancers and musicians are split into pairs to create, discuss, and refine spontaneous works. The most memorable moment of last month’s lab was when Levin, at Dickinson’s prompting, sort of speared her with the cello as she lay on the floor.
By day, he’s the arts director at Durham Charter School, where he teaches the orchestra.
“I’m trying to create what I had at Walnut Hill, but for free, in a public school setting,” he explains. “There’s this overlap I’m experiencing right now between presenting, producing, doing the improvisation work, and the education side.”
Walnut Hill is the arts high school outside of Boston where Levin began on a traditional classical track. He came from a musical family, and when he was six, his mom asked if he wanted to play something. He said yes, cello, because he liked the low notes. “It just was such a rich world to swim around in, emotionally and psychologically,” he says. “Schubert, Beethoven, Mendelssohn. The intimacy of it.” But already, he was glimpsing something else in the music’s cracks.
During his senior year, he began to experience strange audiovisual phenomena, such as playing long open tones and seeing a “yellow chamber” spreading like an artery through his arm. It changed him. “It was like, wait a minute—it’s not about the goal of making the sounds; it’s about what making the sound does to me,” Levin says.
Accepted at two prestigious music colleges in New York, he chose Mannes over Juilliard because he wanted to study with cellist Paul Tobias.
After a year at Mannes, at an arts festival in Florida, Levin got his first chance to improvise with a dancer, something he’d never done.
“It was wild to watch this dancer and not be sure what I should be doing,” he says. “I remember at the end she was spinning; ‘OK, I guess I’ll kind of mimic that,’ so way up high, trilling. Then I had this feeling like, ‘She’s going to hit the mat,’ this information coming from who knows where. So I fly down”—he makes a sound like a dive bomber—“to the lowest note, C. And she slammed onto the mat.”
These kinds of experiences were pushing him away from written scores, toward using the cello as something between an inner dowsing rod and a form of ESP. Instead of going back to Mannes, he spent some time as a bike messenger before obtaining a jazz studies degree from the New England Conservatory of Music (NEC), under the tutelage of mentors like Joe Maneri.
“A lot of this has to do with Joe,” Levin says. “As soon as I went to his class, I was like, ‘Oh, this is it.’ It was all about using the music to go to transcendent places and being grounded in technical rigor. But when I started trying to create my own music, I sucked at it, and I wasn’t prepared to suck at anything to do with the cello. But I had to. It took me many years to do something like invite the space Bach has and not get stuck there.”
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He’s invoking not Bach the dead composer, but Bach the living musician, who could captivate an audience at the keyboard on command. It’s not that Levin stopped playing those treasured suites—“I think I’m going to be in a nursing home playing them,” he says. He simply stopped playing them in public.
Instead, after graduating, he plunged into New York clubs, playing gigs at the Knitting Factory and CBGB, with his quartet, usually of cello, trumpet, vibraphone, and bass.
The music was still color-coded. He would see four interdependent entities—a “kinesthetic sculpture”—vibrating in a room: yellow, red, blue, and green. “Metaphor is really helpful for me in general,” he says.
“I remember being a kid and playing with Legos,” he continues, “how tactile that is. There’s this searching, this motion and vibration; sometimes you know what you’re looking for, but sometimes you’re just sorting and something pops up. It’s a yellow square. ‘OK, now I want a little guy, some wheels, and a radar dish. No, I don’t like that, start over.’”
“I realized I needed to apply that to improvising,” Levin concludes. “When I first started, I was like, Well, would Joe Morris”—another NEC mentor—“like this? But you’re not neurotic when you’re a kid and play with Legos. It’s a space of casual but decisive choices. Should I put yellow? No, I want yellow.”
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