Yardena Arazzi

Matti Caspi arranged and produced Yardena Arazzi’s album“Gypsy Soul”(1987, lyrics by: Ehud Manor), and played the keyboards, guitar, mandolin, bass, drums, percussion, and sang backing vocals.

The album became Arazzi’s bestselling album. “I gave it a sense of a tavern” tells Matti Caspi. “I told them to whistle and shout and stomp their feet, and I took all that and put it in what’s called ‘the first sampler”. “He said to me: ‘try to feel as if it’s three am and you’re drunk” adds Arazzi.

Ehud Manor told about the album:

“When Yardena came to me asking me to write the Hebrew version of gypsy songs, I knew and said that there isn’t a more suitable musician in Tel Aviv (at least) than Matti Caspi, to arrange and produce the songs. Folk music (South American, Spanish, Balkan, Jewish or Gypsy) always manages to excite and thrill him. But more importantly, he finds natural ways to bring it closer to Israeli ears and feelings, and Mediterranean views, while keeping its original tone”.

Matti Caspi:

“When I produced “Gypsy Soul” for Yardena Arazzi, I remember how she sat at the studio. She was pregnant, I didn’t give her any headphones, but a monitor through which she heard a little piano and some rhythm from the drums, and she was startled. She didn’t understand why. She was used to hear herself through headphones along with all the orchestra and sound effects on her voice. I told her: ‘Before you sing with the headphones like you’re used to, sing once like this for me, and after you can sing with the headphones like you’re used to. Then we’ll compare the two performances’. She alone confessed that she sounded way better without the headphones. Actually the reason is that whenever a singer sings with headphones and asks to hear the whole orchestra, he/she is having fun and not really working. Meaning, you get 40% from him/her and then they sweat from the amount of takes they have to make because it doesn’t sound good, and they are not aware of the fact that their ear is in control and they are not focused on the singing. I simply separated her from everything else, and then she just had to give her all in her singing”.

⇐ 25 for Gypsy Soul: Yardena Arazzi and the dream team (Ynet 2012)

In 2000 Arazzi recorded with Caspi the songDuets album: for his albumWe Haven’t Talked About Love Yet".