Yosef Gutman Levitt releases music on his own label, Soul Songs. I mention this first because it is such an apt name: Gutman’s music, with its clarity, openness and natural sense of timing, feels like a balm for the soul. On River of Eden, the Jerusalem-based composer teams up with prolific and critically lauded American experimentalist Peter Broderick. Here, Broderick plays violin with Levitt on double bass, with both contributing to the compositional process. It sounds like a simple setup, and it is, but these twelve pieces display such a wealth of subtle variation, so many shifting moods, that it’s easy to get pleasantly lost in the quiet worlds they build.
Take a track like Cinnamon Swirl, for example. If the melody seems dreamlike, that’s because it is: Broderick came up with it in a dream. It also resembles a Danish folk melody – Broderick lived in Denmark when he was a full-time member of Efterklang – and seems to have elements of film music. It feels visual, but in a detached and unquantifiable way, an open world where you can focus on a different musical or atmospheric element with every listen, be it Itay Sher’s gentle, folky nylon string guitar, Yoed Nir’s yearning cello or Yonathan Avishai’s piano, which has the feel of Yann Tiersen’s soundtrack work about it.
The pace throughout is largely contemplative. The Open Door kicks off with a slow drip of piano notes, like melting ice. It’s not without a certain tension: it seems to exist right on the edge of melody, where traditionally crafted music meets free-association or improvisation. But it is defined by balance rather than dissonance, a timely reminder that melodically atypical music doesn’t have to be harsh or self-consciously difficult. In fact, some of these tunes, like Nigun Al Achat, have about them the simplicity – the naivety almost – of nursery rhymes.
The duo’s improvisational impulses are captured best on three pieces – The Open Door, Wave of Forgiveness, and Resilience – which were originally longer and more unfettered, but were worked into shorter, more self-contained tunes. Wave of Forgiveness, which closes the album, is particularly effective, covering studio creaks and organic swells of strings with skittering piano. It’s somehow analogous to the process by which a pebble is formed by the sea, with time and with something like care, but also naturally and not without elements of the random and the unplanned. Resilience flirts with a fluttering discordance before settling into a more meditative space, with the piano taking up an almost mantra-like theme.
Other pieces are centred more around a specific melodic idea. Nigun Ana Avda has a propulsive, determined feel, its final violin flourish giving the sense of a European folk dance, while Revolution is split into mini sections, each of which give different instruments the chance to develop a theme before effortlessly converging. Eshet Chayil, sways from Jewish folk melody to chamber music, Broderick’s pizzicato running seamlessly into his masterful bowing. The Old City is an unhurried meditation on physical space that bears the weight of history lightly. Like much of this album, it is influenced by Jerusalem – both by its physical environment and by the kind of psychic or auratic presence that the city represents.
Elsewhere, Renewal progresses on a cyclical motif, repetitive and constantly changing, which builds into an ecstatic swell of strings and piano. The comparatively minimalist Reflection is slow and quiet without being sombre, its plucked and bowed strings engaged in an engrossing dialogue. Levitt and Broderick didn’t take long to build up an enviable musical rapport, and River of Eden is an album that exudes a quiet confidence, a calm focal point at the centre of a stormy world.
River of Eden (8th November 2024) Soul Song Records
Limited vinyl release on January 3, 2025
Order via Bandcamp: https://yosefgutman.bandcamp.com/album/river-of-eden