Joshua Levitt is a New York born saxophonist and flutist who built a recording career on either side of the Atlantic by pairing a conventional jazz reed doubling with the ney, the end blown reed flute of Turkish and Arab classical music. Discogs, which lists him under artist ID 216545 with the name variation "Josh Levitt," describes him simply as a saxophonist and flutist; the instrument list that actually appears across his credits is wider than that, running to tenor and soprano saxophone, concert flute, bass flute, keyboards, and the ney. No published source gives his birth date, and he has never been the subject of a full length interview or artist biography, so what follows is assembled from session credits, concert programs, and the promotional copy of the projects he has led.

His earliest documented credit is a New York independent release, the reggae and hip hop group Survival Soundz's Rootzbop Melodies (Survival Records, 1997), where he is listed on saxophone, keyboards, and flute alongside the alto saxophonist and bass clarinetist Andrew Joseph. Three years later he turns up in a very different room. Omer Avital recorded his leader debut Think With Your Heart in New York City in 2000, and when Fresh Sound New Talent issued it in 2001 as FSNT 104, Levitt was credited on nay flute, handclaps, and vocals in a nonet whose front line was Myron Walden, Joel Frahm, Jimmy Greene, Jay Collins, and Greg Tardy, with Daniel Freedman and Marlon Browden splitting the drum chair. Reviewers picked his ney out of the Middle Eastern flavored material, particularly the track "Marrakesh." The following year the same circle used him again: Freedman's own Fresh Sound New Talent date, recorded in New Jersey on June 9 and 10, 2001 with Avital on bass and Jason Lindner on piano, has Levitt on flute on track six.

He spent the first half of the 2000s in the New York downtempo and dub studios as much as in jazz clubs, playing tenor and soprano on 72nd Deepstrict's Space Lady twelve inch for Kif Recordings in 2002 and turning up on three Qalomota Records releases between 2003 and 2005, including a saxophone feature on Joyful Noise's "Call Me." At some point in this stretch he moved to Paris, where he has lived since, and the second half of his discography is almost entirely French and Lebanese.

The Paris years put the ney at the center of his work. Amos Hoffman used him on Na'ama (Magda MGD053, 2006), an oud led album on which Avital plays bass and Avishai Cohen takes over the bass chair on one track, making it the second of three sessions Levitt and Avital share. In 2007 he appeared on two of the records that defined the Franco Lebanese wing of European jazz: Ibrahim Maalouf's debut Diasporas (Mi'ster Productions IBM1), where he plays ney on tracks four and eleven, the latter being the closing "1925," and Toufic Farroukh's Tootya (O+ Music OP126), where he is credited on ney solo and bass flute and takes the ney on "Systole, Diastole," "Radio City," and "Scarecrow and Peacock" opposite Magic Malik's flute and Maalouf's trumpet. The same year he joined the singer and percussionist Meta's album Epigram (Nocturne), a record whose composers include François and Louis Moutin and Marc Ducret. In April 2008 he recorded saxophone on three tracks of the drummer Jean-My Truong's Mémoire du Futur (Label Ames AM 3012), a session that also drew on Pierre de Bethmann, Stéphane Guillaume, and Didier Lockwood.

Two long running relationships carried him through the following decade. Freedman featured him on "Darfur/Oasis" on Bamako By Bus (Anzic Records ANZ-0038, 2012), an album whose other featured guests were Mark Turner, Lionel Loueke, Pedrito Martinez, and Abraham Rodriguez. Meta made him a full member of the band for The Sweetness of a Saffron Wind (2013), where he plays soprano saxophone and ney next to David El Malek's tenor in a group completed by Pierre de Bethmann on piano, Michael Felberbaum on guitar, François Moutin on bass, and Karl Jannuska on drums. That septet took the album to the Institut du monde arabe in Paris on June 7, 2014 as part of the festival "Les Orientaux du jazz," where the program described Levitt and El Malek as the two fine connoisseurs of Eastern idioms in the band and noted that Levitt traded the saxophone for the ney more than once over the course of the set.

Since the mid 2010s his visible work has been as a writer and producer rather than a soloist. He conceived Made in Paris (Jewish Voices), released on January 21, 2019 under the banner Lev Music with the phonogram credit reading simply "Joshua Levitt." Levitt, who had noticed that the Parisian Jewish music scene had singers but no producers putting original material in front of them, selected nine vocalists including the Israeli singer Zion Dahan, the yeshiva world singer Aaron Meir, and David Lampel, and wrote and arranged a song for each of them, working with the drummer Julien Cohen as co-director and Mickael Zafran on management. The twelve track album was launched with a concert at the Espace Rachi on rue Broca in the fifth arrondissement of Paris on January 15, 2019.

Levitt's value to the bandleaders who hire him is that he is a jazz reed player who can also play a modal, quarter tone capable Middle Eastern instrument credibly, which is a much rarer combination than either skill on its own. On the saxophone he is a straightforward post bop player, audible on Jean-My Truong's Mémoire du Futur and in the Meta band alongside David El Malek. On the ney he is nearly always used as a color and as a soloist rather than as a section voice: Farroukh credits him specifically as "ney solo," Maalouf gives him two tracks out of eleven on Diasporas, Hoffman puts him over an oud, and Avital wrote him into the Andalusian and North African material on Think With Your Heart. The result is a career made almost entirely of guest chairs in other people's ensembles, spread across the New York Israeli scene of the early 2000s, the Franco Lebanese scene that formed around Maalouf and Farroukh, and Meta's Paris band. The Institut du monde arabe's own program note is the closest thing to a critical assessment of him in print, and it frames him as one of the musicians who genuinely knows the Eastern idiom rather than gesturing at it.