At Amphi Shuni, Iddo Jacobi walked onstage like a guy who already knows he’s won. No big sermon, no grand intro, just a quick grin, a chord that sounded like it had lived through four different bands, and Daniel ve Jacobi were off.
For years, Daniel ve Jacobi has shared the stage with Guy Mazig’s projects, consistently drawing strong reactions from audiences, and for the past five years, Iddo has also served as a central featured performer in Mazig’s concerts. Jacobi’s thing isn’t just chops. It’s the way he drags rock, funk, and Israeli pop into the same room and makes them get along.
As main producer, main composer, and soloist guitarist and performer of Daniel ve Jacobi – he designs tracks that feel both meticulously arranged and one meltdown away from chaos. “Miss Katz,” (placed in Apple Music Israel’s “100 Best Songs of 2023” playlist) the single he composed, performed, and produced, is a good example: harmonically rich, rhythmically tight, but still loose enough to sound like trouble.
“Soundcheck to Showtime”
Live, the band leans into the grit. The groove shifts from syncopated funk to distorted rock in a bar or two; Jacobi’s tone swings between glassy and scorched, and he plays with that James Brown-esque sense of vocal-guitar punctuation – little stabs, bends, and breaks that push the band harder. When they slip into more atmospheric passages, you can hear his producer brain at work: layered voicings, minimalist motifs, lines that snake around the vocal rather than just backing it up.
“The New Black”
What separates Jacobi from the swarm of guitar guys isn’t volume; it’s focus. In Israel he’s treated less like a sideman and more like a reference point – the guitarist producers compare themselves to and the one veteran artists call when the music actually matters. He has also backed Danny Bassan, Arik Sinai,Yeled, Noam Kleistein and even Matti Caspi along the years of his career, and on this night the performance was further elevated by special guests Full Trunk, and Tal Friedman. You can always hear his fingerprint in the phrasing, the voicings, the way the song breathes.
“A real Israeli music celebration”
You don’t have to like guitar solos to hear it: Jacobi has already made an unrivaled, sustained mark on Israel’s contemporary rock and funk sound, and nights like this just underline the obvious.