Centrum Board Chair, Walter Parsons, announced this month that Port Townsend resident, Bertram Levy, has been named Centrum Champion for 2025. Each year, the Centrum Board selects a most deserving community volunteer, advocate, musician or artist to receive the award, and a commemorative plaque is added, for display, in the McCurdy Pavilion.
Levy is the founder of the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes at Centrum in 1976 and has been featured on more than a dozen albums, including the Smithsonian CD compilation American Folk Music. He was chosen as banjo player of the year by Frets magazine and was highlighted in several national broadcasts of A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor. He is an accomplished wooden boat builder and retired urologist with over 55 years in the medical field.
“Anticipating the 50th anniversary of Fiddle Tunes in 2026, the Board felt it was proper to recognize Bertram for his extraordinary commitment to Centrum and for having created what remains today Centrum’s largest program,” said Parsons. “Bertram is an inspirational musician, voyager, builder, and healer. We’re proud of his continuing involvement in Fiddle Tunes and of his decades of profound care and attention to Centrum and it’s founding vision to preserve culture and tradition and pass this heritage from one generation to the next.”
Bertram was born in New York in the 40’s, he’s been playing southern music since the age of 14. It was after having gone to college in Atlanta and while studying medicine in Durham, NC, that he met and played with Alan Jabbour, who taught him Henry Reed’s repertoire and, along with Tommy and Bobbie Thompson, formed the Hollow Rock String Band. He has visited and collected from some of the greatest fiddle luminaries of the early 20th century including Tommy Jarrell, Henry Reed, Fred Cockerham, Oscar Wright, Lee Triplett and Burl Hammonds.
At the age of 50, Bertram Levy was so moved by the music of Astor Piazzolla that he abandoned all his other musical endeavors to pursue the emblematic voice of the Argentine tango, the bandoneon. His bandoneon studies began in 1991 in Buenos Aires with Miguel Varvello and continued in Paris with Cesar Stroscio. In 2005 Bertram enrolled in the Conservatorio Manuel de Falla in Buenos Aires where he studied classical bandoneon for eight years with the great Rodolfo Daluisio. Bertram founded Tangoheart in 1999 to introduce Pacific Northwest audiences to authentic Argentine tango. He is presently musical director and arranger of the “Tangoheart Quintet” (tangoheart.com), which is dedicated to the performance of classic and modern tango.