Matti Caspi - 50 years of music
A band show with all the classics, celebrating 50 years of musical creation and a long and glorious career of the grand musician in Israel.
It’s very difficult to sum up Matti Caspi’s musical contribution. Caspi isn’t just a wonderful composer, whose songs are both catchy and complex, Matti’s greatness is in him being a gifted and rare musician with his rare talent in any sense, as a composer and a musical arranger, as a multi-instrument player and also as a singer and performer. But even one definition can’t fully describe Caspi’s talent, whose music has influenced generations of countless artists and musicians who he himself groomed and helped grow wings and fly into becoming established artists themselves.
In order to explain Matti Caspi’s uniqueness we can begin with the story of his family who immigrated from Romania to settle in the Hannita Kibbutz in northern Israel. In the Kibbutz his musical talent was born and discovered at a very young age: he would stop his mother from singing lullabies to him since he already noticed she was out of tune. However, a biographic study of Caspi’s life wouldn’t allow us to decipher the mystery surrounding his talent in every musical aspect. Instead we should focus on the uniqueness of his music and the way Matti bought the wide audience yet still gained much appreciation among his fellow artists and musicians.
Caspi has never concealed the many influences on his music, from Brassens’ French Chansons, to Jobin’s Bossa Nova, from classical music to reggae, from Sasha Argov to Stevie Wonder. Still out of all these influences we see one face clearly. It’s impossible to not recognize a Matti song. He never only pays homage to one genre or another, but contains a nucleus of harmonic complexity which allow the listener to enjoy it from the first moment.
In the absence of the ability to describe in a short text Matti Caspi’s uniqueness as a musician, we can instead look at some key moments in his life which allow us a peek to that rare musical talent. One of those key moments is Erez Halevy’s album ‘Tonight’ which was produced by Matti Caspi. It’s Erez Halevy’s first album in which he composed and wrote all the songs. Still, Caspi’s fingerprint is recognized in each one of them, from the unusual harmonies, to the unique way Halevy has produced his own voice guided by Caspi. Matti also decided to play all the instruments and by that has made the album one of the most recognizable with Halevy. Despite the beauty of the songs, it’s uncertain they would have gotten their canonic status without Caspi’s magic touch.
Caspi’s music has gone through changes and developments but it always kept a wide variety which gave it life. It seems that Matti is striving to define his genre. So we can find in his most intimate album ‘One to One’ where he has played one instrument in each song, be it piano or guitar, songs like the introverted ‘Your Hand’, the gloomy ‘She Converted’ or the light and fun ‘Sponjah’.
“I didn’t know you’d run away / I didn’t know you’d fly so far away” wrote Ehud Manor in the song “Here Here” which was written unorthodoxly while Caspi sat beside him and was being given each line as he composed them then and there. It looks like these lines, which describe the relationship between the composer and his music, also describe our experience as listeners, who remain in awe before the blinding beauty of Matti Caspi’s music.
[Dr. Ofer Shenar Levanon]
