Bass great Tony Levin on Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon and King Crimson

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You can hear it in the joyful bounce of Paul Simon’s “Late in the Evening” and the prayerful cadence of Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up”. It winds its way through the knotty rhythms of King Crimson and holds up the bottom end of songs by John Lennon, Pink Floyd and Alice Cooper.

Tony Levin’s bass guitar has served as a foundation, propellant or melodic counterbalance to some of the most innovative, influential and popular music of the past 50 years. But when I visit the musician at home in Kingston, in New York State’s Hudson Valley, he is focused on the present. Later this month, he will release a solo album, Bringing it Down to the Bass.

Levin built the new album around bass parts and posed himself the same question for each track: “Who’s the drummer who would best envision this piece and take it to a better place?” The result is that he is joined by Manu Katché and Jerry Marotta from Peter Gabriel’s bands, former Sting drummer Vinnie Colaiuta and session supremo Steve Gadd, among others.

Also this month, Levin will embark on a tour with Beat, a new supergroup playing 1980s material by pioneering progressive rockers King Crimson and featuring the stellar line-up of virtuoso guitarists Adrian Belew and Steve Vai and highly regarded Tool drummer Danny Carey. They will play music from Discipline (1981), Beat (1982) and Three of a Perfect Pair (1984), an era when Crimson consisted of leader Robert Fripp, Belew, Levin and drummer Bill Bruford.

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“I’m glad to play the music of the 1980s and that’ll be gratifying . . . but what excites me is where Steve and Danny are going to take it and the musical opportunity for me to join them in that,” says Levin.

Fripp, a schoolmasterly figure on stage who sat, suited and bespectacled, looking over his charges, is known for his idiosyncrasies, such as inventing his own guitar tuning and assembling odd band configurations, like the double trio of the 1990s (two guitarists, two bassists and two drummers). The most recent — and most likely final — incarnation of Crimson featured three drummers at the front of the stage. Levin was in both.

“I never tried to analyse why King Crimson did things, especially while I was in it,” Levin says. “To me, what King Crimson is and does lies in the musical sensibility of Robert — and I respect that.”

Levin, who grew up in Boston, was a classical upright bassist at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where Gadd introduced him to jazz and rock. They served as Simon’s rhythm section, including on the 1975 album Still Crazy After All These Years and for the film and album One-Trick Pony. Levin’s sparse bass guitar converses with Gadd’s drum groove on “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”.

Working on Lou Reed’s Berlin (1973) and Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare (1975) led to a recommendation from producer Bob Ezrin to Gabriel, who in 1976 was about to record his first eponymous solo album after leaving his post as lead singer for prog-rockers Genesis. He has been a contributor to Gabriel recordings and tours ever since.

“One of the reasons Tony has been so much in demand for so long is that he is extraordinarily musical without being flashy,” Gabriel says in an email. “Often there is a ‘look at me’ element to virtuoso players. Tony always wants to let the song do the talking. His personality is a mix of a quiet learned professor and an irrepressible enthusiastic child.”

Levin has used his platform with Gabriel to showcase innovations such as his funk fingers — a percussive tool he developed at the singer’s suggestion after he saw Marotta drumming on Levin’s bass strings — and his use of the Chapman stick, a guitarlike instrument played by finger tapping.

Gabriel enthuses over these experimental instincts. “Sometimes, I have an idea for a bass melody as in ‘Big Time’ or ‘Don’t Give Up’, but once they are in Tony’s hands they come to life in a very different way,” he says, referring to songs from his biggest-selling album, 1986’s So. He credits Levin and Katché with laying down the “killer groove” for what became the worldwide hit single “Sledgehammer”.