New Music: Yosef Gutman, Perfect Traveler

BASSIST YOSEF GUTMAN REUNITES WITH ECM PIANIST YONATHAN AVISHAI FOR THE TENDER, WIDE-AWAKE PERFECT TRAVELER…

Patterns and improvisations for five-string acoustic bass guitar and piano, shaped afterwards with melody and layered woodwinds. Released July 31, 2026, on Soul Song Records. Recorded in Jerusalem. Mixed and mastered by Stefano Amerio at Artesuono Recording Studios.

Reunited after Shir Yedidot, bassist Yosef Gutman and ECM pianist Yonathan Avishai spent two days in a Jerusalem studio listening to each other. What they found became Perfect Traveler: fourteen luminous, searching pieces that began as conversations between bass and piano.

Avishai is an ECM recording artist whose solo debut Joys and Solitudes was praised for its minimal, blues-inflected restraint. Here his touch is sparse and luminous. Gutman answers on his five-string acoustic bass guitar, built by Harvey Citron, Steve Swallow’s luthier, whose warm, singing, bell-like high register has become his voice.

Many of the pieces began as patterns and improvisations between the two of them, recorded as they happened. Only afterwards were they shaped: melodies applied, and Gilad Ronen’s woodwinds arranged and layered on top. “I try to leave varying amounts of content up to spontaneous performance and capture,” Gutman explains, “and am less concerned with how everything fits.” The pieces move between Gutman’s own compositions and melodies from the Yemenite and Moroccan Jewish repertoire, among them “Dror Yikra,” “Nin’alu” and “Hareshut.” “They’re extremely elegant and full of life,” he says. “I’m not recasting them. They’re recasting me.”

On four of the fourteen pieces, Gutman speaks a few lines of his own poetry over the music, as one more instrument adding depth and texture.

Raised on a farm outside Johannesburg, Gutman studied at Berklee College of Music and spent years on the New York jazz scene before leaving music, moving to Jerusalem in 2009 and building a tech company that GoDaddy acquired in 2014. He returned to music in 2018 and has since recorded a series of albums on his own Soul Song Records, with collaborators including Lionel Loueke, Gilad Hekselman and Peter Broderick.

Visit online at https://soulsong.re/