Yasmin Levy

Big in Iran: Yasmin Levy, though relatively unknown in her native Israel, is making global waves.

On her new powerful album, the Jerusalemite combines her dramatic voice with the string section of a traditional Turkish orchestra – then adds a touch of flamenco.

Yasmin Levy does not actually compose the melodies she writes. They "land" on her, she says, "like a gift from heaven. I can go to the grocery store to buy milk - and come back with milk and a melody." These melodies, which come to her infrequently and number perhaps five per year, generally surface along with a word or a phrase, always in Spanish. Around all these Levy builds her lyrics.

Indeed, this is just what happened a few months ago when the words "olvidate de mi" ("forget me" ) suddenly came to her. Levy knew why at once: "My beloved aunt, who was my best friend, died 11 months ago. I've always been attached to people who were older than me. My aunt's beloved husband died of cancer when I was 15 ... Beforehand she asked him what to do: Should she die or go on living? She would have easily killed herself. He told her he wanted her to live, to forget him and find another love. She did not find love and 20 years after him, she died of cancer. When I heard these words, 'olvidate de mi,' I knew that it would be a poem that he would write her: 'Forget me because it is my time to go, don't die with me, forget me till we meet again.'

Not long ago, the 36-year-old singer-songwriter says, "we visited my aunt's grave, and my mother, who is not a sentimental person, asked that we play the song at a high volume in the cemetery. Everyone stood and cried although I did not ... That song was my grand finale to her."

"Olvidate de mi" is one of the loveliest songs on Levy's new album, "Libertad" and it does a fine job of capturing the uniqueness, power and beauty of this wonderful singer, whose work tends to encompass great human drama and a life story that involves love and loss, desire and death.

Levy performs the song on the album along with the excellent Spanish singer Concha Buika. The two women met a short while ago. Buika particularly bonded with Levy's infant son. "But she took care not to touch him," Levy recounts. "When I asked her why she didn't hug him, she said: 'Because he is pure and I am a sinner.'"

The two singers share the same stormy, emotional intensity. "I am not a pleasant singer," Levy says. "You can't listen to me on the radio and cook. Either people like me very much or they can't stand me. I've heard stories about women who gave birth to the sounds of my songs, or about people who inscribed words from my songs on their bodies. Unbelievable stuff. People who wanted to commit suicide and said that my songs changed their minds.

"It's weird. I sit in my little corner and spill my guts, and it becomes somebody else's domain," she adds. "For years I was asked why my songs are so melancholy, and I have even tried to change, but I've learned to accept myself. This is my essence. It may be that I've come to help people, to cleanse them, let them cry."

As a little girl growing up in Jerusalem, Levy would listen with her mother to a tape of the great Persian singer Hayedeh. "She was a fat, beautiful singer, with a tremendous voice. We adored her, we would sing along with her," Levy recalls. "And then, when I was 8, we lost the tape. But I did not forget her, and especially one song of hers - called 'Soghati.' I looked for it for more than 20 years. I didn't know what it was called; I only remembered one phrase from it, and every time I would meet someone from Iran I would sing it to him in the hope that he would recognize it.

"Five years ago, I was recording my third album in London, and I had an Iranian driver. I sang him the phrase and he said: 'I will bring you the song tomorrow.' The next day he brought me a burned CD with the song. I listened to it for hours and cried - with me everything is crying - and when I got back to Israel I played it for my mother. It was like an epiphany."

Big in Iran

According to her husband and producer, musician Ishay Amir, Levy is very popular in Iran, even though it is of course forbidden to play her songs in public because she is Israeli. Levy says people have come up to her after concerts in Europe and told her they came from Iran specially to see her. People have also written to her that they were interrogated after they were caught listening to her songs, she says, displaying emails from Iranian fans. One of them, Masoud, wrote: "I wish that someday we can come see you perform in Iran. Believe me, many Iranians feel as I do. I love your voice and personality. You sing no less good than Hayedeh, God bless her."

Another Muslim country where Levy is popular is Turkey. She performs there regularly and is due to do so again shortly, during a two-week tour. She tells of a concert in Ankara at which a 500-strong audience sang along with her, word for word.

"At a certain stage I stopped singing, aimed the microphone at the audience and just listened," she says. "I remember looking at Ishay in disbelief. This is a Turkish audience, they don't understand a word of Spanish, but they learned the songs by heart. And my songs are not easy to digest."

She sings a trilled and fiercely expressive phrase from one of her songs, and says: "Five hundred Turks shouting out a song in Spanish! I was stunned. This is me, little Yasmin from Baka in Jerusalem. You couldn't ask for anything more."

Levy, whose parents have Turkish origins, and who loves Turkish music with a passion, dreamed for years of enveloping her songs in the beautiful, overarching and one-of-a-kind sound produced by the string section of a traditional Turkish orchestra. "Ishay knew that this was my dream, and said: 'Let's get you the violins you've been dreaming of your whole life.' This is really my essence, it's like a Turkish movie," she says. "Whenever I go jogging, ever since I was a teenager, I listen on headphones to Ibrahim Tatlises [one of the greatest Turkish singers]. The hardest-core depression songs. Three years ago, in the middle of jogging, I thought to myself: I wish he would hear me, Yasmin. A year later, I was onstage with him.

"My label in Turkey sent him a CD of mine and he invited me to sing with him, even though he never invites singers who do not sing in Turkish. I cannot describe how I felt during that show. Before I went onstage I cried for a quarter of an hour. I've 'lived' with him, with Ibrahim, since I was little."

When the time came to record her latest album, Levy and Amir went to Turkey to watch as the Turkish studio musicians recorded her songs. Ten violinists recorded themselves several times over, so that between 40 and 60 violins are heard in a number of songs on the album.

"It just took my breath away," Levy says. "I can't describe the joy. It was even greater than I had imagined. I am very proud of the way we blended flamenco and Turkish. It's a concept that has never been done before. Two worlds that are ostensibly unrelated to each other. I want to believe that we made it possible for people to connect to this, but even if I am wrong and am about to stumble, that's fine, I only grow from that."

Levy was not supposed to be a singer. Her father, Yitzhak (Isaac ) Levy, the great preserver of Ladino culture in Israel (he was director of the Ladino broadcasts on Israel Radio, the author of Sephardic romance and liturgical songbooks, and Yitzhak Navon's collaborator in creating the musical "Bustan Sephardi" ), died when she was a year old. Before his death, he ordered that none of his children go into music for a living.

"He knew that a musician's life is a gypsy existence, and he wanted us to have a stable life," Levy says. "I see my kid now - Michael: He wakes up when it's time for bed and sleeps in a different bed every night because his parents are musicians. Until recently I thought I was ruining his life. After one show I left the stage, sat in the dressing room, and [my son was backstage and] suddenly I heard him wake up and I began to cry: I thought that a child should not have to live this way. But then I heard my musicians, who were eating after the concert, calling to him, 'Hey, Mikey, hey baby.' He went out and started walking on the cajon [a Spanish percussion instrument ] and banging on the piano. I said to myself: 'You're not ruining anything. He is surrounded by love and music.'"

But that is something Levy did not grasp when she was young, she adds: "I did everything to avoid becoming a singer because I thought my father was right. I did not know him, but he was a very powerful and dominant figure. I was raised on 'Yitzhak Levy said.'"

Levy's mother, Kochava, also refrained from singing because of her husband's wishes. She was 17 when they met; he was 44. It happened on a young-talent show on Israel Radio in the early 1960s: "They fell in love and when they planned to marry, Dad said, 'I want you to choose between being my wife and being a singer,'" Levy says. "She chose him, and that same day she quit singing and became Yitzhak Levy's wife, and devoted her life to him and to us. The dream of being a singer faded, but the sadness about it stayed with her for years. Dad promised to record an album for her once he retired from the radio, but he died when she was 31. Only recently, two years ago, Ishay and I produced an album of Ladino songs for her. Her dream came true after nearly 50 years."

When Levy was 17 she went to stay with a singer friend of her mother's in Spain. The friend asked her to record a few songs in Ladino on a home tape recorder. She reluctantly opened one of her father's books of romantic music and sang. The friend declared that Levy was a singer, no matter how hard she had tried to escape that fact. But another few years would pass, during which Levy intended to become a reflexologist, before she was convinced.

That happened after she took part in a show in memory of her father, at the YMCA auditorium in Jerusalem. "I did one song and from then on my life changed," she says. "Until then nobody knew about me. I didn't know about myself. And at that moment, at the age of 22, I understood that I had to sing."

Stirring controversy

Levy describes her first album - "Romance & Yasmin" (2004 ), which was recorded with funding from Israel's National Authority for Ladino Culture - as "the album of an innocent girl who came from the tradition - from the kitchen." And yet, within the Ladino community, it kicked up something of a storm.

"Ladino songs had always been sung in a very refined manner, with Western classical overtones," Levy says. "Yehoram Gaon sings that way, and so did Avraham Perera, and so did my father. When I made my first album, I said: 'Hang on, some of the Jews who were expelled from Spain went to Turkey and lived there for 500 years. That is what happened to my family. Do you mean to tell me that the enormous influence of Turkish music can be ignored? There is 'Mizrahi-ness' in Ladino, there is Turkishness, I can't have it sounding Western-classical. And that is how I made the album.

"The Ladino community had a very hard time accepting that," Levy continues. "They told me: 'What, you are making Mizrahi music?' They expected me, as the daughter of Yitzhak Levy, to carry on the tradition and not deviate from it. They wanted me to sing operatically, like Yehoram Gaon, and were disappointed by my interpretation, which had mawwals [musical elements characteristic of Arabic music] and trills. At first I was very frustrated by the response. I asked: 'Why don't you embrace me?'"

Levy's second album, "La Juderia," came out the following year, and did nothing to allay the criticism of the Ladino community in Israel - quite the contrary: "On the first CD, with all of its Mizrahi-ness, my singing was the traditional Ladino singing, which uses what is called a 'head voice,'" Levy says, offering a demonstration (soft and subtle singing, without primal force ).

"But then I went to Spain and I heard the 'chest voice' of the flamenco singers" - she demonstrates a husky, powerful voice - "and my singing style changed. For the Ladino community it was like a second shock: 'What is this, on the first CD she did Mizrahi-Turkish and now she makes a Christian CD?'

"But I came to understand their side of it," Levy continues. "People were raised by their mother and grandmother, who sang in a particular way, and now this kid shows up and has the nerve to do something that verges on sacrilege. What did they take from Spain? The language and the songs. These are songs that helped them survive all the hardship, and suddenly Yitzhak Levy's daughter comes along, takes this pure thing and makes it 'Christian.'"

After the second album, her career began taking off in Europe. Tens of thousands of her albums were sold there, she was treated like a star at festivals, and her albums graced the end-of-year roundup lists in the most respected magazines of the world-music industry.

Levy, who today lives in Mevasseret Zion, has a lot of fans in France and Poland, in Turkey and Iran, as well as in England, where the European launch concert for her new album will take place this November (at the Barbican cultural center in London ). In Israel, too, she is highly acclaimed, popular with a relatively large public. She fills halls when she performs here and gets airtime on the radio that some would say is disproportionate to her true standing.

In Spain, of all places, however, Levy does not have a big audience. "Everyone thought I would do great there, and so did I," she says, "but world music does not interest the Spaniards. Only pop, pop, pop."

Levy will never be a pop singer, but on her new album - her sixth - there are one or two songs that come close to that genre. The title track "Libertad" even made it onto the playlist of Army Radio's Galgalatz pop-music station.

Levy says that the album constitutes the closure of a circle that opened on her first album, and that her next recording will embark on a new path, the essence of which is not yet clear. But one thing is certain: She means to continue fighting against the generic label of "Ladino singer," which she says does not describe her.

"I know that I am going to search, and I know that I am going to get clobbered for it," she says. "Amateurs and critics of world music are very critical individuals. Today, I already hear voices that say, 'Where have you gone? Come home.' But I know no matter what they write, I have my public, the people who go with me through fire and water, and that knowledge gives me the strength to search."

Up to now, Levy has hardly ever sung in Hebrew (she has only done so when singing piyyutim, liturgical poems, but that is in ancient, never contemporary, Hebrew ). Might she do so on her next album? "I have difficulty with Hebrew," she confesses. "Something of the magic slips away, I don't know why. Maybe because it's the language in which I shop for bread and milk. Maybe because - this is a bit of pop-psychology - Spanish enables me to hide. I will record in Hebrew, but only to see if I can crack that nut. If I can manage to do it in a way that will keep Yasmin intact, I will release a CD. But that won't happen before I feel ready for it."