TONY LEVIN BAND-NEW ALBUM AND TOUR 2003

NO MORE LIVE DATES PLANNED DURING 2003: Tentative plans are to record the next studio album in the coming months and then do more touring during 2004. We're hoping to finally make it to Europe in 2004 and get back to favorite places and some new ones in North America and Japan.

GRAMMY NOMINATION: The piece "Apollo" from the PIECES OF THE SUN CD has been nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Rock Instrumental category. Find out if we won during the CBS-TV broadcast on February 23, 2003. (update: we didn't win...maybe 2004 if we get nominated again). (update November 2003: Black Dog from the live Double Espresso has been nominated in the first round for Grammy 2004 but didn't make the finals)

We're back with the double live CD Double Espresso recorded during the Spring 2002 tour. For more information about the CD, to hear song samples or the buy the CD click here.

TONY LEVIN BAND - TOUR DATES. Summer 2003

• 7/13 - Quebec City - summer festival main stage

TONY LEVIN BAND - TOUR DATES. March 2003

• 3/19 - Cincinnatti - 20th Cent. Theater
• 3/20 - Detroit - Magic Bag
• 3/21 - Toledo - Headliners
• 3/22 - Chicago - Martyrs
• 3/23 - Madison, WI - Luther's Blues
• 3/25 - Indianapolis - Patio
• 3/26 - Columbus, OH - Little Brothers
• 3/28 - Trenton - Conduit
• 3/29 - Boston (Cambridge) - House of Blues
• 3/30 - New Haven - Toads Place

TONY LEVIN BAND "SNOWTIRES TOUR" Janunary 2003

• 1/7 - West Springfield VA (DC) - Jaxx
• 1/8 - Philadelphia PA - North Star
• 1/9 - Rochester NY - Milestones
• 1/10 - New York NY - Bottom Line
• 1/11 - Schenectady NY - Van Dyke
• 1/15 - Cleveland OH - Beachland
• 1/16 - Buffalo NY - Tralf
• 1/17 - Toronto ON - Horseshoe
• 1/18 - Montreal PQ - Cafe Campus

NEKTAR AT NEARFEST 2002

It happened. Nektar, the original "core four" members (Roye Albrighton, Mo Moore, Taff Freeman and Ron Howden) plus Mick Brockett's light show reunited to headline one of the nights at the annual NEARfest prog-rock festival. The show was on June 29, 2002 at the War Memorial in Trenton, NJ. Check out the NEARfest site and the Nektar pages ( official and unofficial ) for more information. There are pictures from the rehearsals on this site's Nektar page.

There is talk of additional reunion shows in the not too distant future. We don't know where or when just yet, but as soon as there is any news, we'll post it here. In the meantime, check out the newly remastered Nektar CDs just being released.

LIVE SYNERGY APPEARANCE

The rumors are true. There was a Synergy live set concert on March 16, 2002 at the Alfa Centauri Electronic Music Festival #9 at Theatre 't Spant, Bussum, the Netherlands. (just outside of Amsterdam). We'll post more details if there are more details to report. In the meantime visit www.alfacentauri.nl--that's where the real information about the show and the other performing acts can be found. It was a night of classic Synergy music from the last 25+ years performed live onstage through a great sound system with the Alfa Centauri stage lighting.

Photo by Ed in den Bosch.

TONY LEVIN BAND--NEW ALBUM AND TOUR 2002

The new CD is out. Pieces Of The Sun available on Narada Records/EMI. More information is at this page at the Tony Levin site.

Here's the background:

It only took a decade or so, but the core of the old Peter Gabriel Band (Tony, Jerry Marotta, and me, plus Todd Rundgren guitarist Jesse Gress) has reconstituted itself as the Tony Levin Band . We played on and toured in support of Tony's solo album "The Waters of Eden" (see below). We''ve finished touring across the US and into Eastern Canada from May through November of 2000, and Japan in the Spring of 2001, and several outdoor festival dates during the summer of 2001.

Rehearsing and recording the next album called "Pieces Of The Sun" took place during the Summer and early Fall of 2001. Release is scheduled on Narada/EMI Records for mid February, 2002 with touring across the US and (possibly more) expected soon after that.

We're off the road for a while after touring during March, April and May, 2000. We recorded a live show at the Bearsville Theater (New York) which will be mixed and released as a live CD later this year. We'll post information about the release when we have a date for it. Any additional tour information will be found at www.tonylevinband.com We'll post any new tour dates here as soon as they're announced.

Tony's so much better at keeping a tour diary than I am that I'm sending everybody over to his site to see the tour pictures and read Tony's write-ups about the different shows. I couldn't have done half as good a job at keeping this kind of journal. Go to www.tonylevin.com to see the tour pictures and then come back here.

To make it a little easier to see the band photo albums that Tony keeps, here are some direct links into his site archives:

• some Spring 2002 North American tour photos
• photos from the tour bus, Spring 2002
• T.L. Aug 2001 Sessions (Pieces of the Sun)
• Tony Levin Band at 2001 PeaceFest
• Waters Japan Tour 2001
• Waters of Eden 2000
• More from Waters 2000
• Waters of Eden Sessions 1999
  
  

You can see and hear streaming video of the Toronto show in October, 2000 by following this link:

WATCH TWO SETS TONY LEVIN RECORDED LIVE IN TORONTO OCTOBER 28, 2000

The band appeared live playing and with interviews on Vin Scelsa's "Idiot's Delight" show.--one of his last on WNEW-FM in New York. (A streaming audio archive was available through Vin Scelsa's site--follow the links to see if it's still up).

This is what I spent a lot of time doing on the tour --
lots of time on the bus with my Powerbook (photo by Tony Levin)

People have been asking about my tour equipment. It's now listed on the productions and studio page. And yes, the rumors are true. There is a Synergy piece performed live in the set. There will probably be some minor equipment changes when we hit the road again in 2002. We'll post them as they happen.

XM SATELLITE RADIO

As they say on their site at www.xmradio.com, first there was AM, then there was FM, and now there is XM. You can think of XM as an entirely new radio band of direct broadcast satellite radio blanketing the North American continent with up to 100 separate programming channels--each broadcasting like a distinct radio station with a specific format. You'll need a new radio or adapter for the old one, and these will start appearing in new cars and stores inow.

So what does Synergy have to do with this? I'll be providing the "sounders"--the sonic logos that you'll be hearing on all of the 100 channels as well as the unifying sound logo for the entire XM broadcast service network. It's a very exciting project which will change the way that radio works. It also brings me back to my roots in radio which included college radio at WJRH FM in Easton, Pennsylvania in the late 1960s and early 70s and the now-defunct WSAN AM 1470 in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Synergy is considered to be one of the "XM Originals" Creative Partners in developing this new broadcast entity. (I predict that XM will become a power in internet broadcasting, too.)

PETER GABRIEL REMASTERED CDs RELEASED

Peter's back catalog has been reissued with enhanced audio and packaging. I provided a lot of the photos that appear in the new releases since I had a pretty good archive of images that I shot while we were making all of these records. Some of the images are a little small in the CD booklets, so when I get a chance we'll post bigger versions of them on the Peter Gabriel page at this site. For now, you'll have to use a magnifying glass. There's information about these reissues at Peter's site.

NEW SYNERGY MUSIC CREATED FOR DISNEY

The project is called Tokyo DisneySea. It's a $4 billion new theme park at the Disney complex in Tokyo and now it is open. I walked the construction site about 4 months before completion and it's absolutely breathtaking. The theme as you might have guessed is nautical. The park is hard to describe, but it combines the best of Epcot, Jules Verne, and the world's seafaring cultures past and future.

From late 1999 through the summer of 2001 I worked with Walt Disney Imagineering creating all the music that will be heard in one of the DisneySea's enclaves, an area called Port Discovery. A total of 3 hours of new music in various arrangements and mixes was delivered to the team that created the park's environments. There is new Synergy music heard inside and outside of buildings in this part of the park as well as music connected to one of the water ride attractions that will be visible throughout the Port Discovery village. Imagineering had described to me plans to tie together the music with the movements of the rides and kinetic visual details of the park.

Other well-known electronic composers will also be contributing to DisneySea. It is unknown right now whether Disney will release the music on CD, I have been asked to provide a few of the pieces as CD ready mixes so I'm guessing that there might be a compilation CD of sorts of music from the whole park. If we find out about availability at some later date we'll post the information here.