Yosef-Gutman Levitt feat. Lionel Loueke: Soul Song
Soul Song Records
Seeing their paths converge at Berklee College of Music after moving to Boston from South Africa and Paris, respectively, bassist Yosef-Gutman Levitt and guitarist Lionel Loueke (originally from the West African nation of Benin) later decamped for New York and continued developing their rapport in a weekly Brooklyn gig. Trajectories changed quickly thereafter, however: Loueke began attracting attention for his distinctive playing style and joined Herbie Hancock's band; Levitt left the business and moved to Jerusalem in 2009 after experiencing a spiritual rebirth. Nine years later, he returned to music wielding a five-string acoustic bass guitar and primed to begin documenting the music welling up within.
Capitalizing on momentum generated by the 2022 trio album Upside Down Mountain and an early 2023 duo recording with guitarist Tal Yahalom, Levitt now issues Soul Song, this time with old friend Loueke plus pianist Omri Mor and drummer Ofri Nehemya. The recording sounds different and not just for the participation of the latter two: Levitt's mainly on upright bass and, in contrast to the other releases where his playing dominates, Soul Song finds him largely ceding the lead to Loueke, who eschews the arresting vocal clicks and pops he often includes (heard fetchingly on his recent collaboration with Gretchen Parlato, Lean In) for a more conventional guitar attack, this time on a nylon seven-string acoustic.
There are through-lines from Levitt's previous releases to this one, though. Some tracks feature him on his beautiful five-string—“Chai Elul,” “The Tender Eyes of Leah,” “Amud Anan” (both duo and trio versions), and “Kave El Hashem”—and he augments original compositions with adaptations of nigun (plural: nigunim), the haunting melodies drawn from Hasidic Jewish tradition that also distinguish the earlier sets. Recorded in Jerusalem in the summer of 2022 and featuring material cowritten by Levitt and producer-arranger Gilad Ronen, Soul Song is generally contemplative and lyrical, its tone spiritual. The subdued pitch works in the album's favour for enabling the beauty of Levitt's and Loueke's instruments to be heard with maximum clarity (see the duo version of “Amud Anan - Pillar of Cloud” as a particularly good illustration).
After the infectious “Chai Elul” ushers the fourteen-track set (two of them bonuses) in like the warmest of South American breezes, the soulfully majestic title track complements Loueke's picking with stirring melodies and resplendent contributions from Mor. A performance so terrific sets a dauntingly high bar, but other songs leave strong marks too. The nigunim-based pieces—“Myriad” (elevated by exchanges between Loueke and Mor), the rousing, folk-tinged “Kave el hashem - Hope,” and joyous “Torah Tsiva”—charm as expected, and others, among them “The Tender Eyes of Leah,” “Tikun - Amend,” and “Devotion,” are as lovely. Levitt's far from finished, by the way. Another quartet release is in the pipeline with the bassist, Mor, and Nehemya pairing with guitarist Gilad Hekselman, and apparently a classical crossover album with pianist Yonatan Avishai and a release with Ralph Towner are also on the horizon. Stay tuned.August 2023