Hank Levy on Don Ellis: A Lost Interview, Recovered by AI

By Sean Fenlon on October 11, 2026

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Yesterday, for the first time, I was able to read an interview I recorded about 30 years ago with my composition teacher, Hank Levy, about Don Ellis. The tape had been essentially inaudible since the day I made it. AI finally heard what I couldn’t.

Hank Levy (1928–2001) was my composition teacher at Towson and the person who introduced me to the music of Don Ellis. He was a staff arranger and composer for the Don Ellis Orchestra, and later for Stan Kenton, writing odd-meter charts like “A New Kind of Country” and “Chain Reaction.” My doctoral dissertation, The Exotic Rhythms of Don Ellis (PDF), is dedicated to him.

A tape nobody could hear

As part of my dissertation research, I sat down with Hank in his basement and asked him about Don. I used a microcassette recorder, and I put it too far away from our voices. When I played it back, it was essentially inaudible to human ears.

I kept it anyway. I archived the recording on SoundCloud and waited for AI to get sensitive enough to pull words out of the noise. That happened yesterday, October 10, 2026, using GPT-6 Astra. It’s not 100% decipherable, but it’s good enough to hear Hank tell his stories again. Astra then reconciled the transcript against my dissertation, which identified six damaged names and titles and suggested a likely seventh.

Downloads

Five highlights from the tape

1. The first phone call: “5s and 7s”

Hank remembers his first conversation with Don, who had heard about him through lead trumpeter [Glenn Stuart]. In the draft, Hank recalls Don saying:

“I’m doing some things in 5s and 7s and I want to do them as creatively as possible.” (machine draft, 02:19–02:47)

Don told him he was getting much of his information from studying at UCLA and taking lessons with [Hari Har Rao]. Dissertation match: pp. 25–27 identify Hari Har Rao as Ellis’s UCLA teacher and back up the UCLA–Indian rhythm connection, though not the exact wording. Don told the Glenn Stuart part the same way in a 1977 interview with John Killoch: “He was a friend of Glenn Stuart, my lead trumpet player… So then Glenn put me in touch with him.”

2. A standard in five that fell apart

Hank told Don he had already tried putting a standard tune into five with his own band:

“I remember standing up in front of the band and not being able to find one, period.” (machine draft, 03:17–03:46)

The machine spells the tune “C-Plo,” and nobody has identified it, so I won’t guess. In the next stretch, which the draft flags as uncertain, Hank seems to call it a complete failure, and Don encourages him to keep experimenting. New from the tape: this story isn’t in my dissertation.

3. Meeting the band in Boston, then Baltimore

Hank says he didn’t meet Don or the band until about two years after that first call (the year is garbled). Don invited him to join the band in Boston. Hank found them rehearsing, slipped into the back to listen, and then [Glenn Stuart] stood up, pointed at him and said “he’s there,” and the band applauded. The tour ended at the Left Bank Jazz Society in Baltimore, where, as Hank tells it, an audience raised on traditional big-band jazz didn’t know what hit them. In the draft, Don “drove everybody absolutely insane.” New from the tape: my dissertation doesn’t have this, and the exact itinerary is unverified.

4. Making seven swing

Hank says the first thing he wrote in seven was [A New Kind of Country], “supposed to be a country folk kind of thing, even though it was in Seven.” His trick:

“If you want it to swing, what you have to do is take the three count and subdivide it into two.” (machine draft, 06:19–06:50)

Later he describes regrouping a 2+2+3 as 3+2+2 to give the band “a little bit of a boost and lift.” Dissertation match: pp. 183–184 credit “A New Kind of Country” to Levy. Pp. 88–91 explain additive grouping, unequal beats and the permutations of seven, but they don’t reproduce his demonstration, so the counts stay provisional.

5. “Five could be in five, and not four plus one”

This is Hank’s clearest statement of what he believed:

“A tune in five could be in five, and not four plus one… if you’re doing something in seven, it shouldn’t be eight minus one.” (machine draft, 19:30–19:54)

He adds that in his own writing he never tried to fight the twos and threes inside a meter. He tried to enhance them. Dissertation match: this lines up with the dissertation’s emphasis on swing and groove in odd meters (pp. 162–164). It also points to a real difference between teacher and band: pp. 113–114 show that Ellis sometimes deliberately obscured the listener’s sense of the meter, while Hank wanted the grouping to speak clearly.

Where the tape matches my dissertation and where it adds

• Names and titles the dissertation helped identify: Glenn Stuart, “Passacaglia and Fugue,” Hari Har Rao, “A New Kind of Country,” Bonesville (the rehearsal spot) and Milcho Leviev, plus a likely “Bulgarian Bulge.”
• New stories: the first phone call, the failed standard in five, and meeting the band in Boston before the Left Bank Jazz Society show.
• My own questions: at about 11:36 I’m already sorting Ellis’s meters into categories that became Chapters IV and V of the dissertation.
• Still missing: three dissertation footnotes cite this interview (“Chain Reaction” as Hank’s finest piece for the Ellis band, the rushed Star Wars recording before Montreux, and Kenton’s critics), but none came through clearly. The last 11 minutes (25:21–36:25) still yield nothing reliable.

Quick answers

Who was Hank Levy? A composer and Towson University educator (1928–2001) who wrote odd-meter music for the Don Ellis Orchestra and Stan Kenton. He was my composition teacher, and my Don Ellis dissertation is dedicated to him.

How was an inaudible tape transcribed? GPT-6 Astra transcribed the restored audio into a timestamped draft, then checked it against my dissertation. The draft recovered dialogue mainly from about 0:32 to 25:21.

Can I quote it? Treat it as a lead, not a source. Every quotation needs to be checked against the audio first.

The recording

The original microcassette audio is archived on my SoundCloud. For more of Hank’s music, listen to the Towson University Jazz Ensemble 1989 — Hank Levy playlist and an unidentified Hank Levy composition performed by the Don Ellis Orchestra featuring Milcho Leviev.

Hank, I kept the tape. Thank you.

— Sean P. Fenlon

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