COMING MAY 2, 2025!

When Mel Marvin won a fellowship to spend spring 2023 in Florence, Italy, he asked Jonathan Levi — living down the road in Tuscany — for ideas for a new project. Having just spent the arduous years of COVID writing the opera Truth & Reconciliation with Marvin, Levi suggested something completely different. A rock album. A conceptual rock album based on a Florentine masterpiece—Giorgio Vasari’s 1568 announcement of The Renaissance, LIVES OF THE ARTISTS.

Over that Italian spring, Marvin and Levi wrote eleven songs inspired by Vasari’s gossipy riff on his artist-buddies Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, and their models, collectors, and critics. Marvin set Levi’s lyrics in eleven songs in styles ranging from R & B, folk rock, hip hop, and classical, channeling the lives of other artists from a more recent renaissance.

And over five days at the beginning of 2025, with the guidance of Producer Greg Pliska, a noted composer of stage and screen, they gathered a dozen of Broadway’s top singers, a gaggle of New York’s best instrumentalists, and recorded LIVES OF THE ARTISTS.

Released on May 2, 2025, LIVES OF THE ARTISTS has already been invited back to Florence in a theatrical incarnation in the summer of 2026.

Click here for the paintings that inspired the songs, along with lyrics and other goodies.

Featuring vocals by:

• Chuck Cooper
• Lilli Cooper
• Aisha de Haas
• Darius de Haas
• Santino Fontana
• Ben Jones
• Leslie Kritzer
• Judy Kuhn
• Elizabeth Ward Land
• Veronica Mansour
• Betsy Morgan
• Patrick Page

With

• Guitars – Ted Stafford, Bernd Schoenhart, Gary Maurer
• Bass – Yuka Tadano, George Rush
• Keyboards – Greg Pliska
• Drums – Mark Brotter
• Percussion – Aaron Latos
• Flute & Clarinet – Peter Hess
• Saxophone – Andy Snitzer
• Trumpet & Flugelhorn – Jim Hynes
• Trombone – Mike Davis
• Violins – Cenovia Cummins, Rachel Handman
• Viola – Hiroko Taguchi
• Cello – Kate Spingarn
• Beats – Dahlak Brathwaite

Produced by Greg Pliska

Executive Producers: Mel Marvin and Jonathan Levi

Recorded and mixed by Gary Maurer
Recorded at Sear Sound, Manhattan
Sear Sound Staff Engineers – Maximilian Troppe, Jasper Leach and Steven Sacco
Mixed at Figure 8 Studios, Brooklyn
Figure 8 Staff Engineer – Max Hare
Mastered by Oscar Zambrano at Zampol Productions
Production Coordinator – Jackie Andresen
Special thanks to Roberta Findlay