Yosef Guttman Opens A Window To A Magical World Of Music: Shirat HaShemesh V’Hayarayach

22 Nov, 2020 by yossi

Print this article Font size -16+

Yosef Guttman grew up on solitary farms in South Africa, with music always flowing in his veins. At a young age he started playing bass guitar. His musical skills became the talk of the day, and despite being the only white boy in the class, he was invited to play with well-known African musicians.

At the age of 19, he felt he had exhausted life on the farm, and decided to send a tape with a sample of his tune to Berkeley College in Boston. Surprisingly, he was accepted to study jazz. He soon found himself playing most of the day and quickly becoming a professional, becoming a sought-after player at prestigious shows and events in the United States.

At one point in his jazz career he felt a spiritual emptiness, under private supervision he met a number of Israeli boys and the Jewish spark awoke in him. He went to visit Eretz Yisrael, and since then he began to put on tefillin, keep Shabbat and kosher and gradually adhere to mitzvos. Yosef took a musical break and moved on to start-up.

After almost 10 years of taking a musical hiatus, despite the great success of the start-up, the field began to bore him and the music bubbled in his soul. He consulted with Rabbi Yitzchak Ginzburg about what he should do and the rabbi planted in him certainty that music is his field. He started practicing again playing bass. For a while he was looking for a music producer, until he renewed his relationship with Gilad Ronen, with whom he studied together at Berkeley 20 years ago. After releasing his first album of Chabad melodies with instrumental performance, he began working on a new album of the melodies of Rabbi Yitzchak Ginzburg, with the aim of providing a particularly high-quality musical cover for these melodies.

‘Shirat HaShemesh V’Hayarayach‘ is the first melody to be released from the double instrumental album on the way, dedicated to melodies from a song section. “The idea that all creation says poetry fascinated me. This melody in particular inspired the recording of the other melodies that deal with the chapter on poetry,” he says. In the work of playing, the two were divided: Yosef Gutman plays the double bass, while Gilad Ronen plays all the wind instruments and is responsible for the arrangements and musical production.