Talk about a full-circle moment!
While attending La Jolla Elementary School and La Jolla High School, Brian Levy spent many hours studying with some of San Diego’s top jazz saxophonists and learning the music of John Coltrane and other sax giants.
When Levy makes his Jacobs Music Center concert debut Saturday at the “Blue Train” Coltrane tribute concert, it will be as the director of San Diego State University’s Jazz Studies Department, which he has been steadily expanding since coming on board in 2023 after a decade of teaching at The New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.
“Being back in San Diego, playing a concert devoted to my hero and being the head of SDSU’s jazz department is really exciting — and it feels a little surreal,” said the 47-year-old saxophonist and associate professor.
“It was not something I even imagined 20 years ago. Everything has just seemed to fall into place and I feel very fortunate for those opportunities.”
Adding to this full-circle moment, Levy, and his UC San Diego dermatologist wife, Jennifer, now live in La Jolla with their children — son Coltrane, 6, and daughter Louise, 9 — within sight of the home Levy grew up in with his parents and sister.
But the full-circle-ness doesn’t end there.
When Levy earned his Ph.D. at Brandeis University in 2012, his dissertation was “Harmonic and Rhythmic Interaction in the Music of John Coltrane.” Moreover, his “Blue Train” performance Saturday will be with a one-time only sextet led by trumpeter Gilbert Castellanos, in whose band the teenaged Levy cut his teeth playing at various San Diego clubs and jam sessions.
“I have been waiting for Brian to move back to San Diego for a while now,” said Castellanos, who has curated the San Diego Symphony’s Jazz at The Jacobs series since its inception 11 years ago.
“The fact that Brian is finally here and doing some wonderful things with the jazz program at SDSU made this the perfect time for me to curate this concert. I’m thrilled to feature him in the spotlight, because a lot people here don’t know about Brian yet and they should.”
Levy and Castellanos will also perform together Dec. 12 at Dizzy’s in Bay Park with three student ensembles from SDSU’s Jazz Studies Department. The department’s faculty has grown swiftly since Levy began leading it in 2023, growing from nine members to 13 in just the past year.
The four newest additions are Castellanos and three nationally acclaimed musicians who commute here from Los Angeles to teach at SDSU — bassist Luca Alemanno, guitarist Steve Cotter and singer Jane Monheit, a two-time Grammy Award nominee.
“SDSU is definitely stepping up its game and it’s all because of Brian,” said Castellanos, who is the founder and head of the nonprofit San Diego Young Lions Jazz Conservatory.
Trumpeter Gilbert Castellanos and saxophonist Brian Levy are fellow faculty members at SDSU’s Department of Jazz Studies, which Levy heads. The two began playing together when Levy was a student at La Jolla High School and will perform a John Coltrane tribute concert together on Saturday at Jacobs Music Center. (Gabriel Anthon Patterson)
‘Hands-on approach’
Levy has also expanded the number and range of jazz classes offered to SDSU students. And he has brought in an array of leading musicians to conduct guest seminars and perform with student ensembles, from big bands to quartets.
The guests have included guitarist Peter Bernstein, bassist John Clayton, drummers Adam Nussbaum, Joe Farnsworth and Willie Jones III, pianists Gerald Clayton and Aaron Parks, and saxophonists Charles McPherson and Jerry Bergonzi, who was Levy’s mentor at The New England Conservatory of Music.
“The students are getting really valuable experiences playing with, and learning from, these top musicians,” Levy said. “I’ve been focusing on changing the curriculum to have a hands-on approach and thinking about what these students need when they get out into the real world.
“I want to make the SDSU jazz department a destination program, with great players as teachers inspiring students to travel from across the country to study here. When I started two years ago, there were only eight or nine jazz majors. Last year, we had 28 new jazz majors join the program.”
Levy started learning to play tenor sax during his sixth grade year at La Jolla Elementary School, in large part because one of his best friends had taken up the instrument.
“I liked The Beatles at the time, so I would learn to play Beatles’ songs and I’d play them all the time, nonstop,” Levy recalled. “My parents asked our neighbors: “Is it OK that our son plays his sax all the time? And the neighbors said: ‘Let it be’!”
When his saxophone teacher encouraged him to check out the music of Coltrane and bebop sax pioneer Charlie Parker, the 11-year-old Levy didn’t waste any time following through.
“I went to the Tower Records store, across from the San Diego Sports Arena, and got a ‘Best Of’ cassette tape by each of them,” he recalled.
“Hearing Coltrane was like a religious epiphany! His music was so moving to me. I listened to Coltrane morning and night. The tape I bought had two ballads he recorded with his classic quartet, ‘Soul Eyes’ and ‘After The Rain,’ and they hit really deep for me. I went to Elario’s in La Jolla to hear (saxophonist) Pharoah Sanders, who had played with Coltrane. I said hello to him between sets and he nodded at me.”
Coltrane is one of the key musicians whose music is explored in “Chasin’ the Sound: Learning Jazz Improvisation Through Historical Voices,” the 2025 Oxford University Press book that Levy co-wrote with pianist and University of Colorado Boulder music professor Brian Waters. The 306-page book use solos by Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis and other jazz immortals to provide melodic and rhythmic vocabularies for improvisation.
“It’s an old tradition, but I learned by listening to and copying records,” Levy said.
Absorbing and emulating Coltrane’s music was a passion for the teenage Levy. He learned to play every note on “Blue Train,” the landmark 1958 album Coltrane recorded with pianist trumpeter Lee Morgan, trombonist Curtis Fuller, pianist Kenny Drew, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones.
“It’s a very important record,” Levy said. “I learned all of Coltrane’s solos on it and knew it inside out when I was 17. I even learned his solos on some of the alternate takes that were never officially released!”
The second half of Saturday’s “Blue Train” concert will feature all five songs from the album performed in order.
“In my opinion,” said Castellanos. “the saxophonist who comes closest to Coltrane’s sound is Brian. He has that big, warm sound, which is just what you need to do a concert like this. When you get the right guy, it makes it a lot easier.”
The first half of the concert will spotlight other music associated with Coltrane, along with one of Levy’s original compositions, the ruminative “World As Will.” The selections will also include the Tadd Dameron composition “On a Misty Night” and choice cuts from the 1959 album “Art Blakey Big Band,” which featured Coltrane and trumpeter Donald Byrd.
Yet, while Saturday’s concert is a tribute to Coltrane, it will not be a note-for-note recital.
San Diego native Brian Levy returned here in 2023 after a decade teaching at The New England Conservatory of Music. (Gabriel_Anthony_Patterson)
‘Our own voices’
“Doing ‘Blue Train’ live was Gilbert’s idea,” Levy said. “It’s exciting because it’s a famous recording people know. The concert is a delivery system for the audience to hear what we do. Because, ultimately, we won’t play Coltrane’s sax solos or Kenny Drew’s piano solos. We’ll play their arrangements and swing and groove as hard as they do, but through our own voices and our own solos.”
Finding and honing his own voice in music has been a lifelong quest for Levy.
After graduating from La Jolla High School, he spent a year in San Diego as a member of Castellanos’ band.
“We’re like brothers,” the trumpeter said.
Levy then enrolled at William Patterson College in New Jersey. After studying there with saxophonists Gary Smulyan and Don Braden, pianist Harold Mabern and bassist Rufus Reid, Levy earn his bachelor’s degree in jazz performance in 2011.
He went on to get a master’s degree in jazz performance at the Manhattan School of Music in 2003, followed by his doctorate in jazz studies and performance at The New England Conservatory of Music in 2009. His thesis was on the subject “Freedom versus Form: Polyrhythmic Interactions in the Music of John Coltrane’s Classic Quartet.”
“Coltrane was my biggest inspiration to get involved in music, but in jazz there are probably 20 to 30 musicians I love as much as Coltrane,” Levy said.
“Charlie Parker, Lester Young and Sonny Rollins; my playing is probably more connected to what they played than to Coltrane. Also, Bud Powell and McCoy Tyner are two of my favorite pianists. And in the past 10 years, I’ve spent way more time studying pianists, drummers — like Elvin Jones, Max Roach and Philly Joe Jones — and trumpeters — like Clifford Brown, Louis Armstrong, Freddie Hubbard and Miles.
“What was different for me about Coltrane is a little like Beethoven and classical music. With Coltrane, the music has some other kind of emotion being communicated that is more than just music, something more spiritual that inspires us in some moral sense.”
It was during his studies at The New England Conservatory of Music that Levy wet his feet as a teacher when his mentor, saxophonist Jerry Bergonzi, would take time off to go on the road.
“Jerry would go on tours for 4 or 5 weeks at a time and have me teach his classes and coach his ensembles,” Levy said. “I would teach as a sub for him before I got a full-time faculty gig there. And I lived in Germany in 2010 and 2011 while I was working on my Ph.D. and would come back to the states several times a year.”
Between 2016 and 2022, he did more than a dozen tours of Europe with the Rick Hollander Group Featuring Brian Levy. Their most recent European tour was in February, but Levy’s focus now is to develop and expand the jazz studies department at SDSU.
“It’s a step-by-step process,” he said.
“I just met with the Dean several weeks ago and she said that the biggest growth happening right now in SDSU’s School of Music and Dance is in the jazz program. It’s still a relatively small program, but she sees the potential in it that I see. And, starting next year, I’m hoping to have national jazz artists for guest do residences residencies at the school once a week each semester. The sky is the limit.”
John Coltrane’s ‘Blue Train’
Featuring: Brian Levy, Gilbert Castellanos, Ivan Malespin, Victor Gould, Mike Gurrola and Joe Farnsworth, with an opening set by The Young Lions Jazz Conservatory Ensemble
When: 6:30 p.m. Saturday
Where: Jacobs Music Center, 750 B Street, downtown
Tickets: $42-$74
Online: sandiegosymphony.org