I hope you are well! I want to ask you something. If you like this, please share it with your friends. It is all I could want with this, to reach more people with these musics that captures the History of our civilization. Under the video you have a button to sign up.

This portrait of Deben is from the booklet of a collection of 4 albums with those recordings, that was released by Westminster in 1959 under the name of “In Israel Today“. This recording of Yedid Nafshi is also included in a much newer and easier to find compilation, released in 2014 by ARC Music (whose work of re-editing and disseminating Battacharya’s work is also outstanding), under the name of Music of the Oriental Jews from North Africa, Yemen & Bukhara. You can find more info about this compilation, here. It contains more outstanding beauties so I might come back to this album in the future.

In website The World Jukebox, you can also find information about the different albums released with those recordings as well as a brief information about Deben and his trip to Israel. And if you want to know more about Deben Battacharya, there is a large interview made by his friend Kevin Daly, here.

The recording of Yedid Nafshi is accredited to Nissim Matari (even though you’ll hear two different singers) of whom there are no references apart of this recording. But the booklet of the edition of 1959 explains that Yish’i “was founded in 1950 to house some of the Yemenites who had arrived to Israel during one of the largests airlifts in the world, known in Israel as “magic carpet”“. Deben met the settlers at the end of their day’s work. Then they moved to the village hall, where all the inhabitants, of all ages, men and women, gathered. Deben would edit 6 pieces in the collection of 4 albums, with the recordings of that evening. Let’s enjoy the result.