Whether he’s playing concert halls with King Crimson and Peter Gabriel or jazz rooms with his pianist brother Pete, there’s one accessory that Tony Levin likes to keep close at hand: a camera. Although the 69-year-old musician is primarily known as one of the world’s most inventive bassists, he’s also got a keen eye, as the images he posts to his blog (www.papabear.com/) readily prove.

He does, however, find himself drawn to the dark side.

“Always keep in mind that photographs, or at least mine, reflect my mood, not the way the place really is,” he explains, on the telephone from his home in upstate New York. “Sometimes I’ll play in a beautiful sunlit city and someone will say, ‘Hey, I saw your pictures and they’re dark and foreboding and they look scary.’ And I’ll say, ‘Well, yeah, that’s the way I saw it, even though it’s not the way it is.’

“With my friend Jakko Jakszyk, the singer and guitar player in King Crimson, I usually stay at his house for rehearsals, and he has a beautiful view of pleasant fields and beautiful clouds,” Levin continues. “Well, I can make it look like a Hieronymus Bosch painting—really scary. He’s mentioned to me: ‘You know, that’s not the way it looks!’ And I say, ‘Well, yeah. This is art!’ When I take a picture, it’s just how I feel about a thing.”

It’s easy to surmise, then, that the bassist feels exceptionally good about reuniting with guitarist-composer Robert Fripp in King Crimson. (The lineup also includes Jakszyk, Mel Collins on flute and saxophone, and three drummers: Gavin Harrison, Bill Reiflin, and Pat Mastelotto.) The images that Levin has posted from tour stops in Birmingham and Manchester make those industrial English cities look like they’ve been sprinkled with fairy dust, and his road diary is similarly sunny—a mood, Levin explains, that he’s enjoyed ever since he picked up the phone to find Fripp at the other end, proposing the return of one of the most progressive of all progressive rock bands.

“He said, ‘Are you interested?’ and mentioned some of his basic ideas for the lineup,” Levin relates. “Not that he needed to: I would have been more than interested no matter who the lineup was. Even as a fan, I’m glad that Crimson is active and doing something and changing things up, not to mention how pleased I am that this time I’m a part of it. It’s an honour and a pleasure—and, as always with King Crimson, it’s a challenge, a musical challenge. That’s part of what the band represents to me, and I’m a guy who likes to be challenged, so it’s a nice combination.”

Levin has been an occasional member of King Crimson since helping form the classic quartet lineup with Fripp, drummer Bill Bruford, and singer-guitarist Adrian Belew in 1981. His remit, this tour, is to play sets that span everything from the band’s 1969 debut to pieces so new that they’re being composed in real time, on-stage—all while staying out of the way of those three drummers.

“If this was for a bass magazine, I would say that I’m playing with less low end and more mid, and a lot more growl,” he explains. “Which happens to be the sound that John Wetton had in the early Crimson, but that’s not why I’m doing it. I’m doing it because the bass-drum factor is big and heavy and thick, in a wonderful way, and my modern bass sound, which is big and heavy and thick… I don’t think I need to finish that sentence! It’s not going to work out.

“Let me also add,” he continues, “that there’s a different kind of challenge involved, which is that I’m playing classic Crimson material from before I was in the band, which has classic King Crimson bass parts—which are great bass parts, by and large. And so part of my challenge is to stay true to what’s great about those parts—but also to add myself to it, because I really wouldn’t be happy being in a King Crimson cover band!”

King Crimson plays the Vogue Theatre next Thursday and Friday (November 26 and 27).