“Caspi” means silvery in Hebrew, and it’s fitting that this was Matti Caspi’s last name, because his voice and his music truly sparkled like silver in the light, delighting generations of Israeli music lovers, with a sound that illuminated Israeli society and its cultural heritage.
Israelis of every age can sing his tunes, and his talent was such that he worked in many different styles. He composed, sang, and played ballads, up-tempo songs, comic tunes that delighted children, and hits that were especially beloved because they captured the essence of the Israeli spirit, spotlighting nature and growing up Israeli.
While many of his songs spoke about joy, there was always a touch of something mournful in his voice, which may have reflected his own troubled first two marriages but also mirrored the story of Israel, where, like the way Remembrance Day is followed by Independence Day, happiness and sorrow were always mixed.
It would have been hard to find a secular Israeli household that didn’t own at least a couple of Matti Caspi albums back when people listened to them on record players, but his music never stopped selling, even as the technology changed. Today, his songs have millions of plays on Spotify, YouTube, and other digital platforms.
But he was far more than a commercial phenomenon. His songs had a distinctive sound that made them instantly recognizable, with that silvery something, effortless and graceful, always charged with feeling, and featuring beautiful and complex melodies. While he collaborated with many lyricists, most notably Ehud Manor, he almost always wrote his music alone, and often played all the instruments, including guitar, piano, drums, harmonica, and bass.
Matti Caspi mixed different styles of music long before it was fashionable to do so
Long before world beat music became fashionable, he was mixing styles and genres, including pop, rock, folk, Eastern European, Mizrahi, Balkan, jazz, and Brazilian bossa nova to create a unique sound that reflected the cultures that formed him and formed the country in which he grew up.
Technically, his work would be considered popular music, but he transcended the narrow confines of this genre. The most sophisticated aficionado and least musically literate listener alike could recognize that there was something special in every line of his music.
Dr. Oded Erez from the Musicology Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem summarized Caspi’s place in Israeli musical history:
“Matti Caspi functioned as a living bridge between the first generation of émigré composers of Israeli popular song, most notably Sasha Argov, and later global musical trends such as rock, Brazilian popular style, and American soul. His relatively modest formal training in Western classical music, combined with an extraordinarily broad musical curiosity, shaped a highly personal style that was both firmly grounded in an evolving local musical language and open to influences from abroad. Among the most important of these were Brazilian music, especially the bossa nova of Antonio Carlos Jobim, and the work of Stevie Wonder.
“As a composer who was also a multi-instrumentalist, singer, arranger, and producer, and who excelled at balancing musical complexity with accessibility, Caspi can be described as the Israeli Stevie Wonder. Beyond connecting musical generations and cultures, Caspi’s enduring place in Israeli culture, alongside figures such as Arik Einstein, also comes from the sheer range of his work.
“In addition to setting major Hebrew poetry to music, he wrote lighthearted songs and beloved music for children, bringing the same care and creativity to each. As a result, generations of Israelis grew up with his music at home, in schools, at family events, and through radio and television, in happy moments and difficult times, and as a shared soundtrack linking parents and children.”
As an ulpan student in the 1980s who knew about 10 words of Hebrew when I first arrived in Jerusalem, I quickly learned to identify his songs, and even when I didn’t understand the words, I could feel the emotion behind them. Browsing in record stores and seeing what Caspi looked like only added to his appeal.
It’s been noted often that he rarely smiled in public, and he had the kind of effortless good looks, neither identifiably Ashkenazi or Mizrahi, that made him into a quintessentially Israeli sex symbol, even though that wasn’t an image he cultivated. He was like the shy next-door neighbor who was too good-looking to be true and only nodded when he passed you in the hall, and thousands of Israeli listeners fell for him.
His eponymous 1974 debut album in which he leaned against a wall in bell-bottoms and the 1981 album, Twilight, for which he was photographed emerging from deep-blue water, were always on display in record stores, and next to many record players throughout Israel. His musical talent would have made him into a star no matter how he looked, but his straightforward sexiness propelled him to even greater fame.
Whether he was singing a deeply romantic song like “Yelduti Hashniya” (Second Childhood) or “Yamei Binyamina” (Binyamina Days), a yearning tune about looking back to when he was a little boy, he had the talent of all great vocalists for making it sound as if he were spontaneously voicing his thoughts rather than singing a lyric he had rehearsed.
When he sang such songs as “Nahlieli,” about a little bird, which still delights Israeli children (as does a clip where he dances in Moroccan-style garb, which some have criticized for ethnic stereotyping), and “Noah,” a retelling of the biblical story, he had a playfulness that came through in his singing that was rarely in evidence offstage. He often seemed uncomfortable in interviews and generally preferred to communicate through his music.
His songs conveyed an appreciation for Israeli identity and history, but while they were respectful of this heritage, they often had a light touch and a strong beat, like “Eliezer Ben Yehuda,” about the pioneer who revived Hebrew as a spoken language, and “Shir Am Naki” (A Clean Folk Song), a melodious song about kibbutz children preparing for Shabbat.
The latter song conveyed both the beauty of these young people and the triumph of the fact that they were born years after the Holocaust, along with their eagerness to celebrate Shabbat, even if this observance wasn’t necessarily religious. Adults could feel the importance of the historical themes, but children just loved these songs because they sounded so sweet.
No matter whether his subject was history, heartbreak, or anything else, Caspi’s music was always engaging, never heavy. You learned the lyrics and hummed the tunes without even realizing it, one more sign of how great his talent was. With its mix of virtually all the musical cultures in Israel and his great skill at composing, playing, and singing, his songs truly became a treasured part of the Israeli national soundtrack.