Electricity is patchy in South Africa in general, and particularly on the farm near Johannesburg where Gary (Yosef) Gutman Levitt grew up. And yet at 17, he hankered after an electric bass guitar, so his dad bought him one secondhand.
Two years later, this would be his ticket to the Berklee College of Music in Boston.
“That’s the bass on which I recorded the South African national anthem and sent it to the Berklee scholarship office in the mail. They responded with the offer of a partial scholarship; it was a very exciting piece of mail to get on the farm,” the 45-year-old Jerusalem resident recalls.
“I think what appealed to Berklee was my knowledge of South African jazz. I was the only white guy in my school in South Africa, and I’d associated myself with hardcore jazz musicians, which is socially extremely problematic but served my interest of gaining authenticity.”
Arriving in Boston in 1998, Levitt studied beside such budding talents as guitarist Lionel Loueke, drummers Ferenc Nemeth, Ziv Ravitz, and Kendrick Scott, and saxophonists Dayna Stephens and Walter Smith III.
“When honing musical skills, peers are at least as important as what you learn in class,” he says.
Levitt moved to New York City after graduation in 2001, working as a busboy while looking for gigs. They were hard to come by.
“I have a unique approach,” he explains. “Most bass guitarists are expected to play different styles like rock, funk, and folk, but I had a more soloistic, melodic approach to the instrument, and that didn’t help me get mainstream gigs.”
One evening, after being rejected by yet another jazz club owner, he was heading home on the subway to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope. On the train, a group of young Israelis asked him how to get to Coney Island.
“I said I wasn’t sure. And they asked if I was South African. They were from Ra’anana and recognized my accent because there are many South Africans living there.”
They invited Levitt to join them in Coney Island at an all-night karaoke hummus place. One of the Israelis encouraged him to approach an older woman who, she said, could look in your eyes and know everything about you.
The woman looked at Levitt and asked, “Mi zeh Yosef?” Who is this Joseph?
“I knew that ‘Yosef’ was my Hebrew name. She said, ‘You should get yourself tefillin, they’ll bring you good luck.’ So I got them, and I started going to shul at 7 every morning to put them on. I started experiencing Shabbat and got more into exploring my Jewishness.”
LEVITT PUT away the bass and set up a commercial music company selling South African jazz compositions.
He knew there were slim chances of somebody seeking that specific genre. But he bought an email list of creative art buyers at ad agencies and started sending 20 to 30 emails a day.
Hitting gold
About six months later, he hit gold: Oprah Winfrey’s production crew needed some South African jazz as background music for a video project.
Levitt managed to gather the South African ensemble who’d recorded “Graceland” with Paul Simon in 1986, but the piece they recorded was rejected as “too authentic” – Oprah’s people were seeking a more Disneyfied sound. However, they hired him to compose about 100 pieces for Oprah’s popular TV talk show.
During that time, Levitt started hosting Shabbat dinners. Leah, a student at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women, attended one of his dinners in 2005. They got engaged three weeks later.
By 2007, the couple had two children. Levitt needed more income than he was earning from commercial music. So he taught himself to code and invested $6,000 into founding a technology start-up called Mad Mimi with his younger brother, who’d followed him to Berklee and then to New York.
Mad Mimi revolutionized email marketing. By 2009, Levitt was able to run the business remotely – from Jerusalem.
“We visited Israel in 2008, and when we got back things seemed a little less ours, a little different,” he said. “We realized in Israel we’d really felt a sense of belonging to the land and decided it was the place for us to be.”
He and Leah now have eight children ranging in age from 17 to nearly 2. Although the children speak English at home, their social circles are more Israeli than Anglo.
Levitt, whose parents moved to Jerusalem about five years ago, explains that he was determined to conduct his life in Hebrew so that he could relate to his kids’ cultural experience as Israelis. “That was worth the sacrifice of a couple of years of sounding like a fool,” he says.
And while many Anglo immigrants find that the blunt Israeli style of communication can be rude or insulting, Levitt relishes its raw honesty as “a huge growth opportunity that can make a person strong and more positive.”
AFTER SELLING Mad Mimi to GoDaddy in 2014, Levitt experimented with other start-up ideas and finally picked up his bass guitar again. The mission of his Soul Song Records label, he says, is to bring a new level of creativity, detail, depth, and nuance to instrumental music rooted in melodies of diverse Jewish heritages.
“My wife suggested calling Gilad Ronen, my Berklee roommate from 1999, who had come back to Israel. I asked Gilad to help me produce an album with great local players, combining high-quality Israeli narrative with high-quality communicative music. Music became alive for me again.”
He and Ronen have produced more than a dozen albums, many available on Spotify. The newest album, The World and Its People, features styles ranging from contemporary jazz to classical.
One track, “Awakening,” was inspired by the Kabbalist concept of itaruta diletata, a term signifying “the human effort required to initiate a divine response or revelation, embodying the notion that our actions can trigger a flow of blessings from the spiritual realms.”
The original music was recorded live in Levitt’s studio in Jerusalem’s Nahlaot neighborhood with world-class Israeli musicians that included cellist Yoed Nir, pianist Omri Mor, and guitarist Tal Yahalom.
While most of his followers are in European countries such as Germany and France, Levitt finds lately that “it’s surprisingly challenging to perform as a religious Jew in these places because they don’t really want to deal with the baggage of antisemitism that comes from promoting an openly Jewish artist.”
Therefore, he’s focusing on local opportunities to share his compositions. “My music represents something pure and uniquely Jewish that speaks to everybody,” he says. ■
Yosef Gutman Levitt, 45
New York to Jerusalem, 2009