Matti Caspi Sings Sasha Argov / Mattityahu and Alexander (NMC 1990)

Matti Caspi recalls his first meeting with Sasha Argov

(an interview by Ben Shalev, “Haaretz” February 16th, 2011)

It started with a pickle pastrami sandwich, and developed into two albums and an ongoing musical love affair. Matti Caspi tells us about Argov and the rest of the basic food groups of his music.

A few years ago, at a show where Matti sang some of Argov’s songs, he told me about the first time he heard the song “Dreamers After the Sun”. The year was probably 1977, the hour was around 2 am, and Caspi was lying in bed, having trouble sleeping, and listened to the radio. When “The Suburbs” started to sing Argov and Yoram Teharlev’s song, Caspi felt envious about the composer and the singers. “They have won such a great gift, and I felt I wanted to share it too” he says.

With a melody that jumps in irrational spaces and still sounds so naturally and happy, “Dreamers After the Sun” is indeed one of Argov’s most wonderful songs. But it wasn’t only the melody that captured 28 year old Caspi, who at that time has written many similarly attributed songs. “the musical arrangement of the song was beautiful and so simple” he recalls, “only a pair of guitars and some light touches of the accordion, that’s all. Maybe the hour also had its impact. 2 am. Total silence outside. All of these things made me fall in love with the song and want to sing it”.

Four years later Caspi realized his dream of performing the songs of who he calles “His Musicallity”. “I dared and asked where Sasha lived” Caspi told last week, “And I just went up to his apartment - it was on the fifth floor without an elevator - and I knocked on the door. He opened the door and I stood silent. As I began to speak I stuttered. Without considering the stutter, what I tried to say was: Hello, I would very much like to record an album made entirely with your songs. He answered: Ok, invited me in, offered some material and we started working”.

The extreme nervousness Caspi felt towards Argov quickly disappeared “Because I saw in front of me a man with a sense of humor, a joy of life, and a big appetite, which is important”.

You mean creative appetite?

“No, I mean an appetite for food. Our meetings always started with a good sandwich with pastrami, pickles and mustard. Delicious. After we ate we told a few jokes and only then went to the piano to get some work done”.

“What guided me while working on the songs was to always stay true to the original harmonies” says Caspi, “Because Sasha is a classic that can’t be changed not even in one note. Nothing. It’s like someone doing an interpretation of a Beethoven piece while changing the notes. It’s just undoable”.

However, he adds, “There was one song I allowed myself to take into a different direction, ‘My Love Depends on Nothing’. I felt there was a tendency towards half bossa nova, half slow samba, and since this song was never performed, and Sasha himself told me he’d also thought about that direction, I allowed myself to change the original a little. But as for the rest, I vigorously kept all the harmonies and atmosphere”.

The two albums Caspi recorded with Argov’s songs (“Matti Caspi Sings Sasha Argov” and “Mattityahu and Alexander”) have given a new tenderness to the great composer. Did Caspi feel he was saving the songs from a minor position to which they were pushed? “It wasn’t that” he says. “It there was a salvation, it was only a salvation from mediocrity. Over the years I’ve heard here and there some performances of Argov’s songs that had terrible mistakes. Things that made me horrified and made me ask myself how were they allowed to be recorded that way”.

There were also some performances Matti wasn’t horrified by, but still he felt there was something wrong with them. “Without knowing the original, because I haven’t heard Sasha play the songs, I had a feeling the singers were performing them with mistakes” he says. “And indeed, when I met Sasha and he played them for me as they’re supposed to be, it turned out I wasn’t wrong. There were mistakes”.

“I think the only groups who sang Sasha’s song very well were ‘The Roosters’ and ‘The Wood Sorrels’. They have made a wonderful musical work, but also lacked something emotionally. Sasha’s lyricalness didn’t show. That’s why I had a sense of mission. I felt I had to present the songs accurately, both in a musical and an emotional way. So yes, it had a dimension of righting the wrong“.

In 2005, ten years after Argov’s death, Caspi returned to the songs and performed them on stage (“Exactly the way they were, because we can’t touch them”) where he was accompanied by Argov’s daughter in law, pianist Gabby Argov. Ever since the two have been performing together in this show every few months, and on the 26th of this month they will perform at the Reding Club 3 in Tel Aviv.

Why does Caspi feel the need to return to Argov’s songs? “Yearning” he says. “It never gets old. The music and the lyrics, which are written in a quality you won’t find today. This whole thing makes me yearn for it. I sit at the best place, right next to the piano, hear myself perfectly and enjoy. On the one hand I feel relieved because it’s not my music. On the other hand I feel an immense responsibility to be the best from beginning to end. Each song is a hurdle, and once I’ve passed it, I’m relieved because I did it to my contentment”.

The whole wide world

Argov was one of the most influencing musicians for Caspi, and speaking of which, this is a golden opportunity to ask Caspi about other musical basic food groups, about other artists who have affected him deeply, especially as a boy, and who have contributed to the forging of his unique voice. But before we get to them, let’s stay a little more with Argov and his exposure before Caspi.

“First time I heard Sasha? I was a boy, in the beginning of my teen years” remembers Caspi. “I think they were songs from ‘King Solomon and Solomy the Shoemaker’. Someone brought the record and played it on the kibbutz’s (Hannita) gramophone and I fell immediately in love. Up until then we would listen to all kinds of shepherd songs, songs with a startling ‘Ho’! and suddenly I heard fantastic harmonies and melodies with no boundaries, melodies that didn’t comply with any conventions. It was a musical shock to me, and I’ve fallen in love with Sasha’s music ever since”.

“It had a sense of relief” Caspi continues. “Imagine you’re always surrounded by people who don’t think like you, and that makes you feel a sort of frustration you try to repress. And then you suddenly meet a person who thinks just like you, and you’re so happy about it that all the repression breaks free and finds expression. That’s how I felt when I first heard Sasha’s music”.

Can Caspi point exactly at the musical aspects that affected him directly in Argov? “Not in the melodies” he says, “But indeed in the harmonies. With Sasha, the harmony isn’t summed up only by chords. Along them there’s also a bass movement and both together make the harmony perfect. Sasha has composed this way in a very fanatical way.

“The dynamics between the chords and the bass movement is very complex with Sasha’s music. If there’s a C chord, the bass doesn’t necessarily have to be C as well, it can be something else. Sasha loved delaying the bass. The harmonic movement was already solved and over, but the bass would linger on and meet the harmony only after a few bars. Sasha didn’t invent this trick. As a boy I’d heard this in classical music. But to hear it in songs too - that has opened a whole wide world for me, and ever since I see it as a simple and clear language, and I also have many songs where the bass has its own journey”.

So when Caspi first heard Argov, he’d already known classical music very well, and he says it’s undoubtedly the biggest influence on him. He tells about the teacher Raphael Dragan from the Nahariya conservatory, where Caspi would travel every week from the regional school at Gesher Haziv.

“He sensed my talent and knew what to teach me to play” says Caspi. “He taught me how to play five composers all at once: Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Bartok, and of course Bach. After I’d listened to them entirely, he took a notepad and just scribbled some notes without bars and metre. He said: ‘Arrange the metre and the bars any way you want, and write five different arrangements for the melody, in the style of each composer’.

“When I brought it to him a week later, he said ‘ok’ and continued teaching me as usual. But he was smart, because this way he has opened an entire world called harmonies and genres for me, and it stayed with me forever. Raphael Dragan, my first and only teacher”.

Something aesthetic

What did Caspi listen to in his forming years other than classical music? “As a boy I rigorously listened to a radio program called “From World Folk Songs” he tells. “It was broadcasted every late Saturday morning, and each time they played song of a different folk. I swallowed it with such thirst, and that’s also one of the greatest influences I’ve had. It was indeed from all over the world: songs from South America, the Andes Mountains, Eastern Europe, Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Indian and Japanese music, French Chanson. Music from every corner of the world, and everything spoke to me. This mixture, of uneven rhythms from the Balkan, alongside African and Brazilian rhythms - that’s one of the main things that have created my wide and versatile musical basis”.

Most of the Israeli musicians of Caspi’s generation were deeply influenced by the Beatles (both as a band and as a codename for the musical revolution of the 60’s). The music of Shalom Hanoch or Danny Sanderson - that was the Beatles meets Hana”chal Band. Caspi is a different story. “I think the Beatles didn’t affect me” he says. “I really loved them, but as an aesthetic. It didn’t leave its mark on me. I enjoyed the Beatles like you enjoy looking at the beach or eating a delicious meal. But after I swallow it’s no longer there”.

“That didn’t happen with classical music and world Folk music from India, Africa, South America and the far east. When I heard that music, it aroused an endless yearning in me. As if I know all those places and want to be there through music”.

“What about these”? says Caspi’s wife, Raquel who is sitting beside him. “Oh, That comes later” says Caspi. “I’ve had some singing instructors. Based on what I’ve heard from them, I’ve become a better singer today. Ella (Fitzgerald) was an amazing instructor, I tried applying the lightness in her singing, and also, I had two other instructors: Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. Such amazing singers. I still can’t get enough of Bing’s voice. It’s irritating how easily it comes to him. They told about him that he never learned how to sing his songs until reading them for the first time at the studio. He would arrive at the studio and simply start singing. An amazing effortlessness.

“Later over the years there were many bands and musicians I loved and appreciated, and that I learned from, but it wasn’t a real influence anymore” says Caspi. “What about Stevie Wonder”? asks Raquel. “Stevie of course, yes” corrects Caspi. “One of my best teachers. And in later years, Jobim. To this day, whenever I hear his music, while driving the car for example, it’s like the sun shines down on me after it’s been cloudy and chilly. Suddenly it comes out of the clouds and warms me up”.

“Each time I listen to it and am surprised all over again. How did he do it. What a genius. Jobim is a genius just like Sasha was. A genius with his arrangements, his sensitivity towards the lyrics. Even if you don’t understand Portuguese, you can almost understand what the song is about. Just like that”.

[original article]