Yasmin Levy - Profile (2024)

Yasmin Levy is an Israeli singer. She is a Sephardic Jew and one of the key representatives of Ladino music.

Yasmin Levy is the daughter of Yitzhak Levy, who was a composer, cantor, song collector and researcher of Sephardic music. He was born in 1919 in Manisa, a village near Izmir in Turkey. When he was three years old, his family moved to Palestine. After the founding of Israel, Levy was appointed as a young man to head the Ladino department of the Israeli state radio. During his lifetime, Yitzhak Levy made it his task to document and archive the music of the Sephardic Jews. Yasmin Levy was barely one year old when he died in 1976 at the age of just 57.

Ladino is the music of the Iberian (Sephardic) Jews. The instruments used in this music include flamenco guitar, Arabic oud, violin and cello, as well as diverse oriental percussion instruments and piano. In the times of Moorish Spain, the Sephardim, a Jewish ethnic group, lived for centuries in peace alongside Arabs and Christians. With the Reconquista, the oppression against them increased and in 1492, they were faced with the choice of either converting to Catholicism or going into exile. After being driven out, the majority of Sephardim settled in the Ottoman Empire (Turkey, Bosnia, Greece) and in northwest Africa (Maghreb). They retained their own culture and language, but mixed it partially with elements of their new surroundings.

Yasmin grew up in the Baaka quarter of Jerusalem, which at the time was a veritable melting pot of peoples and cultures. She was exposed to the most diverse music traditions: Turkish, Persian and Moroccan music, classical, jazz, Jewish and Islamic sacred music. At the age of six, like her siblings, she started learning to play piano and her love of music developed at that time. She did not discover her own vocal talents until much later when she was a young adult. It was a friend her mother who pointed out her remarkable singing voice during a holiday in northern Spain, prompting Yasmin Levy to study flamenco singing in Andalusia. Through the legacy of her father, she had finally found her way to Sephardic music and little by little, developed her own version of it. In contrast to what had previously been a very strict and conservative interpretation of Ladino music, Yasmin Levy followed her own musical intuition and developed a modern variant of Ladino music that was open to other influences. In addition to the elements of flamenco in her music, influences from Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Greek and southeastern European music can be heard. That, of course, is reflected in the composition of the band, which includes musicians from Spain, Paraguay, Iran, Turkey and Israel.

In 2004, Yasmin Levy released her debut album “Romance & Yasmin” on the Dutch world music label Connecting Cultures. The album was produced by her future husband Ishay Amir and became a big success, earning her a nomination as Best Newcomer in the BBC World Music Awards in 2005. That same year she already released her next album “La Juderia” where she primarily combined Sephardic music with flamenco, singing many of the songs in Spanish. On the album there is an extremely rare and extraordinarily beautiful song fragment sung by Yasmin’s father Yitzhak Levy that stems from the 1970s. This was followed by the albums “Mano Suave” in 2007 and “Sentir” in 2009.

Despite her immense international success, Yasmin Levy had to repeatedly put up with intense criticism from conservative contemporaries, which almost made her give up her music career in 2011. Fortunately, her admirers convinced her otherwise and in 2012, she brought out the album “Libertad”, which as the album title alludes to, may be regarded as her personal liberation.

Her sixth and most recent album came out in 2014 and was called “Tango”. As the title suggests, this album is Yasmin Levy’s reminiscence of Argentinian tango. Backed by the Israel Netanya Kibbutz Orchestra under the baton of Yaron Gottfried, she cut 11 tango tracks and sings, apart from Ladino and Spanish, also in English on this album. The CD comes with a bonus DVD containing a recording of a concert.

In her career, Yasmin Levi has given a great number of concerts all over the globe. She has already performed in Israel, Spain, Iran, Turkey, USA, the UK, Germany, France, Poland, Switzerland and many other countries. She has also entered into a variety of music collaborations during her career, such as with Egyptian singer Natacha Atlas, Turkish singer Ibrahim Tatlises and Spanish singer Buika.

“Of course, we have people here who hold the most radical religious view one can image. But I also see another reality here in Jerusalem: people with different religions and cultures who live together. In my world, there is no room for war and fighting. I wish that we could really find more respect for each other in this city in which there are such varied ways of looking at the world.”

“The songs which were written in Ladino are a good way of bringing that across. They come from a time in which Jews lived in peace with Muslims in Spain. We have to remember that there was a long period of mutual respect. And there is no reason why we can’t have that now as well.” – Yasmin Levy (excerpt from an interview on Qantara.de from 19 November 2007)

Albums:

Romance & Yasmin (2004)

La Judería (2005)

Live at the Tower of David, Jerusalem (2006)

Mano Suave (2007)

Sentir (2009)

Libertad (2012)

Tango (2014)