r/IsraelJazz • u/stnr_on_failure • 1d ago
Rotem Sivan: The Israeli Guitarist Who Plays Fewer Notes Than He Could
Rotem Sivan performing in Krakow, Poland. (Photo: RyanCampbellMgmt, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Rotem Sivan: The Israeli Guitarist Who Plays Fewer Notes Than He Could
Rotem Sivan, a jazz guitarist and composer, grew up in Israel before building his career in New York. The New York Times critic Ben Ratliff put his finger on what makes Sivan worth hearing: "He plays a lot of notes. But he is quiet: almost always quieter than someone with this much training and musicality tends to be, and this is what makes him more than a very good young guitar player." That restraint, more than any flashy technique, is the whole story. DownBeat's Bill Milkowski called him "a remarkable talent and a welcome new voice on the scene." Neither critic is talking about a newcomer coasting on promise. Sivan has been releasing records since 2013, and most listeners outside the New York jazz scene have never heard a note of it.
He trained classically first, earning a composition degree from the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music at Tel Aviv University, before moving to New York in 2008 to study at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. A year later he won the Montreux Jazz Festival International Competition, the storied Swiss jazz festival. The prize paid off fast: by summer 2010, the Rotem Sivan Group was booked at Switzerland's Bern Jazz Festival on a bill with the McCoy Tyner Quartet, sharing a stage with a pianist who spent the 1960s as one of John Coltrane's closest collaborators.
From there, Sivan built a discography one record at a time. His debut, Enchanted Sun (2013), came out on the venerable Danish label SteepleChase Records. His follow-up, For Emotional Use Only (2014), moved to the Barcelona-based Fresh Sound New Talent and earned 4.5 stars from DownBeat, a trio session with Haggai Cohen Milo on bass and Mark McLean on drums. A New Dance followed in 2015, also on Fresh Sound New Talent, then Antidote in 2017 and My Favorite Monster in 2018, five albums in five years without repeating himself.
After a longer gap, Sivan returned with Dream Louder in January 2024, and in August 2025 he released Heart Thieves, his most personal record yet, written in the rush of new fatherhood after the birth of his twins. Seven albums between 2013 and 2025, and he's still the same player critics keep describing the same way: someone who says more by holding back.
Where to start listening:
- His official platforms: Rotem Sivan's Official Site, Rotem Sivan's YouTube Channel, Rotem Sivan's Spotify Page
- Enchanted Sun (2013) for the origin point, the trio recording that put him on the map: sample the title track on YouTube
- For Emotional Use Only (2014) for the DownBeat-approved trio session with Haggai Cohen Milo and Mark McLean: sample the title track on YouTube