Dr. Aviv Livnat
Guitarist, singer, composer, painter and researcher of the philosophy of art
Composer and guitarist of the duo, painter, and today a researcher of the philosophy of art.
The story
Grown in a house of art
Aviv and Arik grew up surrounded by art. Their mother, the painter Eve Livnat-Merzer, brought them into the world of art and music from an early age, and the hand-hammered copper of their grandfather, the artist Arieh Merzer, stayed with them as a lifelong artistic dialogue. Their father, the pilot Arnon Livnat, fell in the Six Day War; their first album is dedicated to him.
Their roots were in rock and progressive rock. Aviv studied classical guitar and Arik classical flute, and only later did they arrive at jazz. From free jazz they moved through settings of poetry, music for theatre, dance and film, and finally to a meeting of jazz and Jewish music that became their signature.
Why it mattered
Jewish Blues, before it had a name
In the Israel of the 1990s, Yiddish was still treated as the language of the old world, and Jewish music rarely appeared on jazz stages. The Livnat Brothers set Yiddish poetry by Itzik Manger and Jacob Glatstein, Hasidic melodies and Hebrew verse inside an Israeli jazz-rock sound, and critics had to coin a term for it.
They took this music to places loaded with Jewish memory: Poland, Prague, Sofia, Paris and London, and to the UN in New York. It was a rare case of an independent Israeli jazz act that kept creating, recording and touring for two decades on its own label, while founding the Raz-Ram foundation to bring the arts to orphaned children.