Yosef Gutman Levitt

ABOUT

Yosef Gutman Levitt is a bassist and composer in Jerusalem whose music grows out of the nigun, the wordless Hasidic melody, and out of a lifelong conversation with jazz. His main instrument is a five-string acoustic bass guitar built by Harvey Citron, a high, singing instrument he plays as a melodic voice as much as a bass; he also plays upright bass. Since returning to music in 2018 he has released more than fifteen albums and EPs on his own label, Soul Song Records, with musicians including guitarist Lionel Loueke, pianist Yonathan Avishai (ECM), Peter Broderick, guitarists Gilad Hekselman and Tal Yahalom, pianist Omri Mor, cellist Yoed Nir and woodwind player and producer Gilad Ronen.

EARLY LIFE

Levitt was born in 1979 in South Africa and grew up on a farm in Knoppieslaagte, where chickens, geese and horses roamed and the brick paths around the farmhouse made a good place to practise kickflips. He gave up piano lessons for skateboarding at eleven, and at sixteen Jaco Pastorius and Weather Report brought him to the bass guitar. The same quiet that had served his skateboarding now gave him long, uninterrupted hours with the instrument. At eighteen he sent Berklee College of Music a recording of his own arrangement of the South African national anthem, played in harmonics, and was offered a scholarship.

BERKLEE AND NEW YORK

At Berklee, from 1998, he found himself among trumpeter Avishai Cohen, guitarist Lionel Loueke, drummers Ferenc Nemeth, Ziv Ravitz and Kendrick Scott, saxophonists Dayna Stephens and Walter Smith III, and Gilad Ronen, his roommate then and his producer today. He graduated magna cum laude and moved to New York with Loueke. A noisy Brooklyn apartment on Atlantic Avenue, a restaurant kitchen and then a job bussing tables at Blue Ribbon in SoHo paid the rent, and what was left went to paying musicians such as Loueke, Ben Monder and Robert Stillman to play with him on Thursday nights in Brooklyn.

A LONG PAUSE

Riding the train home late one winter night from the Zinc Bar, he asked himself why he was making music at all, and stopped until he had an answer. In the meantime he produced more than a hundred pieces of music for The Oprah Winfrey Show, then taught himself to program and design software and founded a technology company, which he led until its acquisition by GoDaddy in 2014. He stayed in technology until 2018, when the answer came and he turned back to the acoustic bass guitar.

THE MUSIC

His first album, Chabad Al Hazman (2019), set Chabad nigunim for his bass and an ensemble of Israeli musicians. The trio album Upside Down Mountain (2022), with pianist Omri Mor, led Bill Milkowski to ask in DownBeat, “Where did this guy come from?” Since then have come Soul Song, with Lionel Loueke; River of Eden, with Peter Broderick; two duo albums with Tal Yahalom, Tsuf Harim and Tal Yasis; Melodies of Light, with Omri Mor; The World and Its People, a drum-less chamber session with Yahalom, Mor and Yoed Nir, mixed by Richard King; Why Ten?, with Gilad Hekselman; Unity, with Itay Sher; Resisei Lyla; and Shir Yedidot, his first album with Yonathan Avishai.

Perfect Traveler (2026) brings him back together with Avishai. Recorded over two days in Levitt’s Jerusalem studio, with Gilad Ronen’s woodwinds layered on afterwards, and mixed and mastered by Stefano Amerio at Artesuono in Italy, it moves between his own pieces and melodies from the Yemenite and Moroccan Jewish repertoire, among them Dror Yikra, Nin’alu and Hareshut. Moments (2025), with synthesist Adi Goldstein, came out under Every Day Miracle, his name for quieter, meditative work.

TODAY

Levitt lives in Jerusalem with his wife and eight children. He records several albums a year in his own studio there and runs Soul Song Records.

Gear

Harvey Citron five-string acoustic piccolo bass guitar (custom)

Upright bass (flat-back, 3/4 size, about 150 years old)

Walter Woods amplifier

Barefaced cabinet