Yosef Gutman Levitt: Upside Down Mountain
Yosef Gutman Levitt

For South African-born, Jerusalem-based Yosef Gutman Levitt, the long journey culminating in Upside Down Mountain involved its share of challenges. Raised on a farm outside of Johannesburg, Gutman attended Boston's Berklee College of Music before relocating to New York for more than a decade. That stint turned out to be more of a grind than anything else, so much so he abandoned the music business and channeled his energies into tech entrepreneurship. But years after returning to Israel in 2009, he found himself gravitating back towards music-making and rethinking his approach.

Pivotal to that development was his decision to focus on the acoustic bass guitar, whose sound is central to the album's identity. In contrast to other jazz albums where bass is often overshadowed by other instruments, his resonates clearly throughout Upside Down Mountain when he partners with pianist Omri Mor and drummer Ofri Nehemya. The acoustic bass possesses a bright, singing tone that enables it to be heard even during the music's densest passages, especially when he's playing in the upper-register. Bolstering that clarity is the fact that the compositions, all Gutman originals, often use his instrument as the lead melodic voice. Despite the difficulties he's endured, the tone of this trio recording, his first, is uplifting, rich with soulful melodies and a generally harmonious feel.

Amazingly, all of the pieces on the album were conceived in a single sitting. By his own account, he improvised “whatever flowed freely from my heart without thinking, editing or perfecting. I got my sound recorder ready and improvised for a few minutes, caught something, recorded it, named it. After a few hours I had material for an album and sent it to my co-producer Gilad Ronen, who made sense of it.” The trio performances followed, with all of it done over four days and executed live with everyone in the same room. The joy expressed in the music can be traced in part to the experience shared by the three in creating the music together.

Fittingly, acoustic bass guitar is the first sound heard on the album, its bright, almost sitar-like tone in “Wedding Song” calling to mind the guitar timbres on Pat Metheny's “Long Train Home.” That's only one of the track's appealing features, however, as the rhythmic thrust the trio gets up to swings infectiously, and the tune's terrific folk melodies don't hurt either. Speaking of Metheny, there are times when Levitt's writing shares with his American counterpart a similarly melodic quality, as evidenced by the entrancing lilt of “Time With Abba” and “The Great River.” Here and elsewhere, the performances reveal a deep connection between the three players and show how excellent a fit Mor and Nehemya are for the bassist. There are many episodes of stirring beauty on the album, from the stately poetic lyricism of “Before the Journey”—trio playing of the highest order—to the soulful gospel-tinged warmth of “Joshua” and “Twelve Stones.”

October 2022