The following article is an overview of the career of Israeli pianist, composer, arranger, and producer Gadi Goldman. The main source of information is an interview with Mr Goldman, subdivided in two sessions, conducted by Bas Tukker in December 2025. The article below is subdivided into two main parts; a general career overview (part 3) and a part dedicated to Gadi Goldman’s Eurovision involvement (part 4).
All material below: © Bas Tukker / 2025-26
Contents
- Passport
- Short Eurovision record
- Biography
- Eurovision Song Contest
- Other artists about Gadi Goldman
- Eurovision involvement year by year
- Sources & links
PASSPORT
Born: October 9th, 1964, Hadera (Israel)
Nationality: Israeli
SHORT EUROVISION RECORD
Gadi Goldman (גדי גולדמן) was the producer, arranger, and conductor of the Eurovision song composed by Moshe Datz, ‘Amen’. With this entry, Liora represented Israel in the 1995 edition of the contest held in Dublin.
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Hadera, a town in the heart of Israel, Gadi Goldman grew up as the son of a mother working as a headteacher and a father who ran an construction company. “My father’s family had moved to Israel from Romania after surviving World War II. On my mother’s side, however, I’m the eighth generation living in Israel. Neither of them was particularly interested in music. However, as I’ve been told, my mother’s mother was a talented accordion player. When Israel became a country in 1948, she played the accordion in the street while everyone was dancing the hora in sheer jubilation. Unfortunately, I never got to know my grandmother very well, as she passed away when I was still quite young.”
“As a toddler, I was knocking on every table, every chair, just making sounds with cans, forks, and knives… that’s what my parents told me. I was obviously fascinated by rhythm, but the noise I produced was driving them crazy. That’s why they went looking for a way to quieten me down. They came up with the idea of buying me an accordion and sending me to a teacher, a man from Russia. I was six years old at the time. After two years, however, my Russian teacher passed away – and there was no replacement available. In fact, my parents had planned to go on a trip to the Munich Olympics in 1972, but fortunately they cancelled it (infamously, eleven Israeli athletes and officials were taken hostage and killed by Arab terrorists in Munich – BT). With the money they saved, they bought me an upright piano. So I switched from the accordion to the piano – and I started taking classical piano lessons with a professional musician, Mrs Rita Goldstein. She was a wonderful teacher. Later, I also went to the local conservatoire in Hadera for more theoretical background.”
“My vision was never to become a concert pianist. I was simply having a good time studying the piano. My dream as a child was to be a professional footballer. I was in the youth academy of Hapoel Netanya. In fact, I was part of a team from the club which was sent overseas on a training camp at SVV, a league club in the Netherlands. At the age of sixteen, I made my debut in the first team as a fullback. Hapoel Netanya was in the Israeli Second Division at the time. I later switched to Hapoel Hadera.”
Gadi as a youth academy footballer with Hapoel Netanya
“For a long time, my two passions, football and music, went hand in hand. After practising the piano with my teacher, I would rush off to a training session at the football club, then going back to focusing on my piano lessons again upon arriving home. Others thought it was a very unusual combination. The players in my team weren’t really the type of guys to discuss classical music or my new discoveries – jazz and fusion. Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea were my heroes. I was also listening to all the great pop music which came out in the 1960s and 1970s; The Beatles, Elton John, Earth Wind & Fire… soul, Afro music, anything really. In fact, quite early on, I found out that classical piano wasn’t for me. To me, this is the art of playing the same part over and over again, but each time a little bit better. I have never had an interest in doing that. I wanted to be creative, discover new music, and get better at playing in different styles.”
“In those days, there was one small record studio in Netanya, close to Hadera. Somehow, I was approached to do sessions as a keyboard player when I was fifteen years old. There was an English singer by the name of Mitch Hiller who was recording there (Mitch Hiller is related to Tony Hiller, one of the songwriters of ‘Save Your Kisses For Me’ – BT). He lived here in Israel. In 1981, I went on a tour with him. Then there was a rock band called Gan Eden. They needed a substitute at the piano – so they asked me to join them and do my thing. There were some great players in that band. It was a wonderful opportunity.”
“Mitch Hiller and Gan Eden were not the only acts I worked with as an adolescent. Around the same time, I was invited by a local musician who was a little older than me, Amir Frohlich (conductor for Israel in Eurovision 1993 – BT), to assist him with the music production of a big children’s festival which was organised in Netanya on Hanukkah. Amir and I bonded well. He is a great guy. We have been friends ever since. Meanwhile, there were other music bands who asked me to back them up on their tours. I wouldn’t say I travelled the whole of Israel, but our schedule in and around Tel Aviv was really quite extensive. Naturally, all of these experiences gave me the opportunity to develop as a musician.”
“Just after I had become a regular first team player at Hapoel Hadera, I was called up for the Israeli army. That was in early 1983. At first, I wasn’t happy, because this put an end to my footballing career for the moment, but my mood changed when I was picked to be in one of the IDF music groups. When you get into the army and you play an instrument, you can take part in an audition – and when you’re deemed good enough and there is a vacancy in one of the army music groups, you’re in. So I ended up not being trained as a soldier at all! The level of musicianship in the IDF music groups is quite high. Most of the well-known pop singers, instrumentalists, and producers in this country went through the IDF music groups during their military service, so the IDF was a springboard for aspiring musicians. Suddenly, I found myself surrounded by talented people of my age. In the beginning, it was a challenge, because I had never played in a three-month theatre tour. One of the great things about being a musician in the army was being given the time to work on a show. They also hired professional music producers to teach us and show us what to do; among them was Dani Robas, one of Israel’s most famous singer-songwriters.”
Gadi (second from left) performing with his IDF Music Group
“Quite early on, I began to try my hand at writing arrangements for the army group I was in, just by using the theoretical knowledge I had picked up earlier on. There was plenty of time and it was a great learning experience. There were no strings or brass in the band; just a rhythm section with two guitars and five singers. Although I’m not a good singer, I took on vocal parts myself as well. So there I was, writing music, singing, doing sketches, performing live for soldiers in army bases across Israel – and I was enjoying myself greatly. Furthermore, I started to build up a network with other young musicians. It was during my days in the army that I decided that music was going to be my path.”
“At the beginning of 1986, I was discharged after three years in the IDF. I was determined to study music at an academy – and the only academy which fully focused on entertainment music was the Rimon School of Music in Ramat Ha-Sharon. It’s a small school, only founded one year before I started my studies, and it was meant to be the Israeli version of Berklee College. Because it was eight months before the new school year would start, I practised and practised on the piano to have the technique required to pass the entrance exam, ten to twelve hours daily. Half-heartedly, I also tried to revive my footballing career, going on a trial with First Division club Maccabi Petach Tikva. They allowed me to train with the first team. However, after a month, I decided this was not for me anymore. ‘No, thank you,’ and from then on my focus was on music only.”
“In those months, my old piano teacher, Mrs Goldstein, asked me to teach her son, Adi. He was an aspiring musician. Adi was my first and last student! Actually, I know very well that teaching is not for me. I prefer creating music rather than teaching it to others, but, as it turned out, Adi and I got on extremely well. It was obvious he was a very talented guy. Adi Goldstein made it to become one of the most famous music producers in Israel. He works worldwide. In fact, his work was picked up by companies such as Nintendo and NASA. He even got to supply the music for political campaigns for Obama and Hillary Clinton! He is a genius and I’m very proud of him; can you imagine, my only student! We’ve remained close friends until the present day.”
“After passing the entrance examinations, I continued doing at Rimon what I had been up to in the preceding months; practising my piano technique ten hours per day. I opened the school in the morning and I was also the one to put out the lights in the evening. A lot of times I just asked myself, ‘Why are you doing this?’, but the answer was always that I was simply having a blast. Meeting with other musicians, playing the piano, working on some classical theme and improvising to it for hours… it was great and of course it helped me to grow as a musician. I wish I had the time for this sort of thing now. Back then, if I wasn’t playing in school, I was at home at the piano or playing in jazz clubs. There were occasional studio sessions here and there as well. Music was everything. I didn’t have a life beyond it.”
With Moshe Datz (c. 1992)
“At Rimon, you don’t choose one main subject. You simply follow different courses, ranging from improvisation and ensemble playing to theoretical subjects such as solfege, harmony, and composition. In fact, my improvisation teacher was Rami Levin, who got to conduct in the Eurovision Song Contest later on in his career, just like me. Of course, there were arranging classes as well. This included some big band arranging, but not at the level at which it is taught at Berklee. Rimon was a new school and there weren’t that many students to rehearse your arrangements with. I remember writing charts including brass, for an ensemble of some fifteen players.”
“I studied at the Rimon Institute for three years. In my final year, I was the assistant to the professor teaching us about computer programming. This was the very beginning of computers in music. It was a mind-blowing moment for me. I spent days and nights figuring out what to do with a computer. We’re talking about things like synthesiser programming and making playback tracks. Nowadays you can get great results with computers, but these were the days of Atari and IBM. Looking back, these were very poor devices. You didn’t have measure, it didn’t sound right, and using it for live performances would have been out of the question. The options were very limited and it took you hours to get a result which AI can do in five seconds for you today. In those days, it was pretty hard work. At the end of the year, I did a performance for my fellow students together with my professor, using the computers which we had programmed to my original music. Getting to know the computer was a big event in my life. I was fascinated from the start.”
“Coming out of the academy in 1989, I went straight into all kinds of jobs; doing sessions and accompanying singers on stage. Musicians knew of me from my days in the army or from Rimon – or I took the initiative myself by stepping up to people in the business to introduce myself. There was no lack of work. Because many Israeli artists perform for the Jewish communities abroad, I also got to travel quite a bit. I remember travelling to New York for the first time in my life. I was in the backing band of some singer. When we arrived from the airport at the Edison Hotel in Broadway, we were all suffering from a terrible jetlag. I wanted to go to sleep, but the guitarist had other plans. ‘Come on, let’s go, Ron Carter is playing in the club downstairs!’ Ron Carter is a jazz legend. We were amazed to just step into this club. There he was, Ron Carter, a giant in the music business playing for a small crowd of ten, fifteen people with his band, all suit and tie. America was a culture shock. New York and also LA – wow! In fact, I considered moving to America. Most of my friends had left Israel to try their luck in the US, but when I met them during our tour, it was clear they were having a hard time making ends meet. They were living in tiny apartments and performing at Jewish weddings, whereas I was already earning serious money. I confess that I’m very spoiled, but that’s what kept me from taking the leap.”
“At some point, I found myself working with some horrible singers – and I mean horrible on a personal as well as on a musical level. I got depressed being with them. For two whole months, I quit the business, going to the beach every day and thinking to myself how I couldn’t stand the bad vibes around me. Was this the life I had been dreaming of? I wasn’t enjoying it at all. Then after these two months, I received a phone call from one of the main booking agencies in Israel. I knew the manager of the company, because I had arranged and produced two records for him with a mouth organ group called the Adler Trio. ‘Do you want to work with Duo Datz?’ They had just finished third in Eurovision 1991 with ‘Kan’, so I knew who they were, but I just asked, ‘Are they nice people?’ When the voice on the other side confirmed that they were, I said, ‘I’m in!’ They needed a keyboard player and musical director for a tour to cash in on the success of their Eurovision performance. Moshe and Orna (the married couple forming Duo Datz, commonly referred to in Israel either as Datzim or Datz & Datza – BT) were far too busy to discuss their wishes extensively with me. I met them no more than two or three times before sharing the stage with them for the first time. I just received their repertoire and wrote the live arrangements using my computer. I like to think that the sound I created for them was rather innovative for the time.”
Moshe and Orna Datz feeding Gadi whipped cream in a publicity stunt appearance at Gadi Goldman’s coffee bar in Tel Aviv (c. 1992)
“Every Israeli act which is successful in Eurovision wins instant popularity in this country, and Moshe and Orna were no exception. We did about 30 to 35 performances each month. It was totally crazy. They were very famous, everybody loved them, and there were thousands of people attending their shows at every venue. It was crazy! On some of our Israeli Independence Days, we were hopping from one place to the other in a helicopter. They were one of the top acts in Israel. Although I was only part of their back-up band, it felt a bit like being a rockstar. It was a really nice period.”
“My booking agent had been right, because the Datzim are both very nice people. They proved easy to work with. We have always had good vibes together, good karma. We were more than colleagues; we were friends, sharing experiences together – not just working, but going out together, having a blast. It was a gift from heaven that I got to work with them, also because the level of their music and performances was so much higher than what I had been used to before.”
“Before long, I also became the producer and arranger of the studio recordings done by Datz & Datza. The approach was always the same; Moshe wrote all the songs himself, making a demo with keyboards. He isn’t an instrumentalist, but he always managed to express clearly what the main idea of a song was. Then my job was to fill in the gaps, correct bits and pieces, tidy it up here and there, making musical sense of it. Moshe was always closely following what I was doing with his songs. He is a perfectionist and he could be a stickler for detail if he wasn’t happy with an element in the arrangement. On the other hand, he was always eager to listen to my suggestions. In that sense, we were working as equals, but he had the last word, which is perfectly logical. I mean, he was the singer, he was standing on that stage performing the songs – and when people felt a certain song was bad, they pointed at him, not at me. I’ve never had a problem with being the guy in the back. Ego is not for me.”
“Moreover, let me point out that Moshe was always very generous. He allowed me to get all the arranging and production royalties, which isn’t a given in the world of music. I had my biggest hits as an arranger with him. Perhaps the stand-out hit is a children’s song which everyone in Israel can sing along to from the kindergarten age onwards. It’s called ‘Efo ha’uga’ or ‘Where Is The Cake?’ and it’s a song which can be played at any celebration. It’s an extremely simple song, but very effective at the same time. That’s Moshe’s main quality as a songwriter.”
Izhar Cohen’s 1993 album Legat bemim, legat bruch was arranged and produced by Gadi Goldman
“With the Datzim, I also toured abroad – in fact, we did international tours performing for the Jewish communities elsewhere in the world almost every year. We were in Belgium, Canada, the US, Argentina, Brazil… particularly Brazil was amazing. On our day off in Rio, we were taken to a concert of Brazilian music especially geared to foreign tourists. We couldn’t stand it, so we asked the guy who accompanied us to take us to something more authentic. We were taken to a small club with only a couple of dozen people in the crowd. There were no amplifiers, just three or four microphones, nothing more, so I thought to myself, ‘We’re screwed again,’ but then a group of musicians took to the stage with a lady singer called Beth Carvalho. She was one of the best-known samba singers in Brazil. She started singing and… three hours later we were still dancing on the tables and having a great time. Brazil is a fantastic country; the food, the energy, the vibes, the bossa, the samba – just marvellous.”
“Meanwhile, there was one weird side-step in my life. Just after I had started working with Moshe and Orna, I bought myself a coffee bar in Tel Aviv. It was an idea of my brother-in-law. He was a computer guy, I was a musician, and he just told me, ‘Let’s start another business!’ It was a horrible mistake, because I didn’t get any sleep in the following ten months. The Datzim were very supportive of me. One day, while their Swedish Eurovision friend Carola was touring with them in Israel, they took her along to have a coffee and an ice-cream in our bar. It was a great publicity stunt. In fact, our business was a huge success and we were making a lot of money in a short amount of time, but this side-step also hurt the musical side of my career. Long story short, we sold the bar within a year at a great profit. It was a huge relief to get away from this business.”
“By far most of the work I was doing in the 1990s was connected to Duo Datz, but there were other projects too. I took on studio productions, especially with artists connected to manager Shlomo Zach. Although I can’t remember in detail, Shlomo was probably also the one who helped me find another line of work by introducing me to the television studio. For quite some time, I was a musical director and arranger of music performances on several talk shows, such as the Gabi Gazit Show and Dan Shilon Square. That’s how I got to work with Adam, Dafna Dekel, Ilanit, and many others. The number of musicians in the band varied from time to time, depending on what kind of arrangements were played. Sometimes I led the band from the piano, sometimes while standing up to conduct them, whichever was most appropriate at any given time.”
“Around the year 2000, I came to the conclusion that something in my life had to change. By then, I was 35 years old, and I found myself leaving the house in the afternoon to travel to a concert in which I was part of the backing band multiple times per week. Almost as a rule, I landed in a traffic jam – and after finally arriving at the venue, you had to do a sound-check for one hour, then wait for an hour and a half for the audience to come in, then do a show of an hour and a half… and I wasn’t back home until 2am. So I spent ten to twelve hours in total just on one gig. My emotions might have been different if this had been a gig of my own music, but of course it wasn’t. The TV work wasn’t that much different, with all the waiting involved until you finally did the show. It depressed me. I wanted to feel creative again; and other than that, I wanted to spend more time with my family.”
The IDF Orchestra performing in the 2014 Torchlight Ceremony, produced for Israeli television by Gadi Goldman
“So I changed my life and found another world out there. There were some managers who knew me and they suggested joining them in organising corporate events and private parties. Companies across Israel do shows for their employees. Some of these gatherings are for thousands of workers, but they can also hire me for a lavish bar mitzva ceremony in the desert. My work involves putting together shows with live music, playback tracks, or a combination of the two. I’m the musical director of a company, working with animators, film editors, designers, choreographers, dancers, and musicians. It’s quite a competitive market, because our company has several rivals vying for those big corporate events.”
“To work on these projects, I built my own studio in a suburb of Tel Aviv, some 200 metres from my house. This allows me to practically work from home. Every morning, I walk to my studio with a smile on my face. Good vibes! At heart, I’ve always been more of a studio guy than a concert guy. I usually work eight to ten hours per day, finding myself alone working on the pre-production of some show. Many of the pieces of music I put together on my own with the computer and my own instruments, but the studio is big enough to invite musicians, singers, and engineers to work with me on any given project. Building my studio and joining this event company is the best decision I ever took in my career. It’s a line of work that allows me to use my creativity on new compositions, new arrangements every day. Most are short-running projects, which allows me to be home on time and take care of my family. It’s a life that suits me perfectly. I love it!”
“The most honourable job I did in my early days in this new business was composing the music to the reopening of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. That was in 2005. It was a huge ceremony. I wrote a classically oriented score for them, with lots of strings, music which is both melancholy and hopeful. I was very touched when the museum decided this music was too good for just this one event; they’ve continued using it for the virtual tour on their website – and it’s also played annually for the Holocaust Memorial Day, which is broadcast live from Jerusalem on all Israeli TV channels. Yad Vashem asks me for permission to use the music every year – and I’ve always been more than happy to give it to them. My late father and his family were Holocaust survivors from Romania. I consider it a big honour that my music is connected to Yad Vashem and the lasting memory of all Holocaust victims.”
“I didn’t leave behind the world of pop music altogether. I remained the producer and arranger for Datz & Datza until their divorce in 2006. Subsequently, they continued their careers separately, each with their own new producer. In the following years, there were some other recording projects I worked on, here and there. Notably, I did two easy listening albums for a big record company with multi-instrumentalist Nitzan Ein Habar. He is the number one saxophone players in Israel. This was not a case of Nitzan Ein Habar performing and Gadi Goldman arranging and producing. Both of our names were on the cover – and we arranged and produced all the tunes together, with Nitzan playing most of the instruments and me working on the additional arrangements. These albums were never intended to be funky or clubby; just traditional easy listening. For one track, we did a cover of a famous Israeli song in Count Basie style, with woodwinds and brass and all. We also performed our music on stage a little bit after the albums came out. It was a nice sidestep to be able to work on this type of music.”
Gadi at the keyboards leading his band with lead singer Momi Levy for the Stevie Wonder tribute concert tour (2015)
“I’ve also done some composing for commercials, television programmes, and films. In fact, I even was an actor in a film. A director called Nissim Notrika did a film on daily life in Jerusalem in the 1960s and 1970s (Resisei Ahava / Obsession, 2011 – BT). I didn’t write the whole soundtrack; they wanted me to write two songs in Greek style, with bouzoukis. These songs were for a scene which was shot in a club. I was also to be the leader of the Greek band performing this music in the film – and on the set, the director then proceeded to ask me to say a few lines. I had to ask the manager of the club for our money. So that’s another element on my CV; I can claim to have worked as an actor. The truth is that I only got to do these lines, because they needed a replacement for an actor who was supposed to act as the singer of our group, but it proved beyond the budget of the film to hire him!”
“In 2014, I was commissioned to put together the music for the Torchlight Ceremony, the annual celebration on Israeli Independence Day, held on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. It’s broadcast live on all TV channels, so you’re guaranteed 100% ratings! I’ve done the show a second time since then. As you can imagine, Independence Day is a festive event. I played the grand piano on stage, accompanying famous singers like Shiri Maimon and Gali Atari. The IDF Orchestra is also a fixed element in it. For the second Independence Day I was involved in, I also included Tararam in the programme, a group of professional drummers with whom I work very often on my corporate events. Playing on their big drums, they always manage to get the audience involved. They are like stomp on steroids, a great group of musicians. Independence Day is the one event where you don’t have to worry about budgets. Enormous amounts of money are put into it, some five million dollar per ceremony.”
“Tied to Independence Day is the Israel Prize ceremony, an event broadcast from a large auditorium in Jerusalem. Each year, ten individuals who have made an impact on Israeli society are given this prestigious award – scientists, people working in humanities, and artists. Nurit Hirsh is one of the prize winners! I did the music to that show several times.”
“Possibly the biggest commercial event I was involved in was in 2016, when Elbit Systems celebrated their fiftieth anniversary. Elbit is a military technology company and one of the biggest employers in Israel. They hired Ha-Yarkon Park in Tel Aviv for a show which hosted some 20,000 spectators. It was a combination of singers performing and my own music items. Their managing director did a performance on stage as a hologram… a wonderful event from start to finish.”
On stage accompanying Orna Datz (2020)
“In recent years, I’ve also done quite a lot of video mapping. It is a technique that involves projecting video onto non-flat surfaces like buildings or mountain ranges. It’s a progressive art form which you can see in more and more places nowadays. Writing music to images is something which I love. This is original music which you have to write to a script. Projections can last up to twenty minutes, so long music segments are required. Among other projects, I did one video mapping score for an event in the mountains of the Negev Desert and another with projections onto the Walls of Jerusalem. It’s an art form which has become more and more mainstream. I love it, because you can see the impressive results, music and image combined, in front of your eyes.”
“Just because I want to put a smile on my own face, I occasionally do my own stage projects. In 2015, I put together a ten-man band with Momi Levy as the lead singer to do a tribute night to Stevie Wonder. I’ve always been a big Stevie Wonder fan. I did all the arrangements for this show, with which we toured Israel. Given that the band is so large, I didn’t make a lot of money with it, but that was never the purpose. I was having a blast on stage with some of the best instrumentalists in Israel. We performed at quite a lot of venues, now and again, but the Covid lockdown put an end to that. I still have all the arrangements, so it wouldn’t be a problem to get the show on the road again. Maybe I will in the near future. I must say it’s an alluring prospect. I wouldn’t want to go back to a life as a touring musician, but I need the stage now and then.”
“Another thing I did just before the lockdown was put together the arrangements for a musical theatre show with the songs of Kobi Oshrat. Of course, all his Eurovision hits, such as ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Olé, olé’ featured in it. Kobi himself approached me to take care of the production and the arrangements. It was a nice assignment to work on. Other than that, I didn’t do that much theatre; some children’s music show, some original music for dancing performances, that’s about it.”
“As you can imagine with the type of work that I do, big corporate events, the Corona lockdown was a horrible time – and, more recently, the Gaza War made regular life in Israel come to a standstill again. The music and entertainment industry in Israel has been hit hard. With so few live music events being organised, I was happy that I had saved some white money for black days, as we say in Israel. I was fortunate that my studio was so close to my house, so I could continue working, it was just that there was hardly any project that I could use my output on. There were some virtual TV gigs, but arriving at that studio was weird, man. Singers standing five metres away from me instead of right beside me at the piano; everyone wearing face masks. I’m very happy that these days are behind us now.”
Gadi conducting a string group, featuring star cellist Nahar Eliaz, in his own studio in Givatayim (2023)
“Some years ago, Orna Datz visited me. We hadn’t worked together for over ten years – since her divorce from Moshe. She just said, ‘Let’s do a show together!’ She wanted to do a solo show – and I saw no reason to say no to her idea. She’s a good friend and we’re of the same generation. She was in the army in the same years as I, but in another of the IDF music groups. So I put together a show for her. We’ve continued working together, although Orna had to stop for some years, because her son passed away following an epilepsy attack. It was awful and she had a terrible time. Just recently she has made her comeback and I made her a new show, with another Israeli lady singer accompanying her on the stage – which enables them to perform as a duo, doing duets together, such as ‘Kan’, for which I did a new arrangement in techno style. Orna isn’t recording new material, just doing occasional gigs here and there. We’re both 61 years old now, so as you can imagine we’re not exactly running onto the stage anymore, but slowly, step by step… no, just joking, she is a delight to work with, a professional artist from head to toe.”
“I’m totally convinced that in four or five years’ time I will not have a job. Artificial Intelligence is taking over and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’ll have to find ways to make use of AI without making myself superfluous. My philosophy has always been to embrace progress. You can stand by the side of the road watching progress rush by, as some of my colleagues have done, but in doing so they’ve been left behind. You cannot stop these developments – just like it was impossible to keep computer programming out of music in the 1980s. Being angry won’t help you. I don’t know what I’ll be doing, let’s wait and see. I’m just feeling sorry for young musicians. They have a huge problem. The performing arts are here to stay, but in terms of studio recording I think AI will take over their job from start to finish.”
“Looking back, perhaps I should have focused more on my own music in the early stages of my career. When I came out of Rimon, I started working with all kinds of Israeli artists, earning quite big money. I bought myself a new car three months after coming out of the academy. When you’re young, you don’t think about what your life will look like thirty or forty years later. Some of my contemporaries had the vision to write and record original songs, form bands – and those who succeeded, rock bands such as Mashina and Ethnix, are still resting on the laurels of the hits they had all those years ago. On the other hand, perhaps I would have found it boring to play the same songs in every concert for forty years. I think I just have to recreate myself time and again, laying out a new road every day.”
“I’m quite satisfied with the career I’ve been having. When I started out in the music business, I had in mind to work with Sting and Elton John. I figured out that this was never going to happen, but still – I’ve done very interesting things over the years, until the present day. Each day, you can find me in my studio at half past eight, working until late afternoon. That is the life for me. It allows me to raise my daughter, see my fiancée, go to the beach, and spend time on my hobbies, surfing and table tennis. I don’t really care if someone thinks I’m a boring person, living the life of an employee. I’m old enough not to worry about the opinion of others. I’ve never become a Hans Zimmer or a John Williams, but I know I’m a good musician enjoying his job. Yes, I’m happy!”
EUROVISION SONG CONTEST
Gadi Goldman took part in the Eurovision Song Contest on one occasion, in 1995, when Israel was represented by a young female singer, Liora Fadlon, who sang ‘Amen’, an anthemic ballad composed by Moshe Datz – the male half of Duo Datz. At the time, Goldman was the musical director and producer of Duo Datz. In the festival final in Dublin, ‘Amen’ finished in eighth position with a total of 81 points scored.
“Let me start by telling you that none of us had ever heard of Liora,” Gadi Goldman recalls. “Apparently, she had done one previous album, but it cannot have made much of an impact, because I clearly remember that I first met her when her manager Shlomo Zach took her to the recording studio where we were working. He wanted Moshe to write a song for her to take part in the Kdam, the Israeli Eurovision selection. So Liora was a surprise, but a pleasant surprise, because it was obvious to me early on that she was an excellent singer.”
“Apart from his output for the music duo he had with his wife, Moshe regularly wrote songs for other artists in those days; Sarit Hadad, Zehava Ben, and others. He didn’t have tons of songs waiting on the shelf to be recorded by fellow artists and he wasn’t the type of songwriter either who got out of bed and wrote three tunes. That’s not how he works. Usually, he was approached by a certain artist or manager who asked him for a song in a certain style or around a given subject. Moshe is someone who can write songs working from a basic idea or a catchphrase – and in the case of ‘Amen’, the main idea was to pick a universally recognised word that everyone around the world would recognise immediately and could sing along to. That word was amen. He then developed the song around this catchword.”
Swedish singer Carola – on the left with her then husband Runar Søgaard – stopping by at Gadi Goldman’s coffee bar in Tel Aviv with Orna & Moshe Datz; to Orna's left, a replacement drummer who had joined the Datzim's stage show at that time (c. 1992)
“So the song was written with Eurovision in mind. The lyrics were done by Hamutal Ben-Ze’ev, a lady who is a great professional lyricist, for theatre and for popular songs. I’ve been working with her on songs and theatre projects regularly, until the present day. I honestly don’t remember Moshe’s demo version, but the way we worked on it in the studio must have been the same as always; being the arranger, I took the draft and worked on a pop sound. I wrote the arrangement to the backing track as well as the vocal parts for Liora and a backing group. No doubt, Moshe was looking over my shoulder, because he is a perfectionist if ever there was one.”
“For the Kdam, we needed a group of singers to back up Liora on stage. That’s why we organised an audition, with the judges being Moshe, myself, and a director. We picked five of them, two boys, three girls, based on their vocal abilities, their looks, and their charisma. Two of them had never been on stage before. One of the guys was working as a barber! There was no risk in taking such young and inexperienced singers. We had selected them carefully, you know. All of them had the qualities to be on that stage. When we won the Kdam, it didn’t come as a surprise. We all had high hopes for the song. I thought it was so likeable, a tune which you can sing along to after hearing the chorus for the first time. It’s a type of song which I love.”
“Now that we were going to go to Dublin, the arrangement needed to be reworked into an orchestration. It wasn’t that complicated, because the synthetic arrangement I had done originally had basically already been oriented towards an orchestra. In the second half of the song, there is a trumpet line which I consciously put into the score; a Bach trumpet in the style of the arrangement of ‘Penny Lane’. In pop music, it’s more usual to put in an electric guitar to perform a solo, but somehow I had the idea to use the trumpet instead. It was my salute to The Beatles, I guess!”
“Because I had done the whole arrangement by myself, Shlomo Zach and Moshe offered me the conducting job in Dublin. I had studied a little bit of conducting at the Rimon Institute and I had an extended band with which I accompanied talk shows on TV at the time, but the Eurovision orchestra was something different. I had never stood in front of such a large group of musicians. I had my doubts. I said to myself, ‘Hey, this is a responsibility.’ Then I decided to visit one of my professors from Rimon, Mosha Zorman. I asked him if it was wise to do this – and he just said, ‘Go and knock them down!’ So in the leadup to the Eurovision Song Contest I took some conducting lessons from well-known Israeli conductors, just to get the rust off my academy lessons and make my conducting style look smooth. Of course, I also learnt by heart the chart that I had written – in short, I prepared myself in a professional manner.”
Gadi Goldman (directly to Liora's right) after winning the Kdam, the Israeli Eurovision pre-selection, in 1995
“Travelling to Ireland was a special experience. I felt the responsibility of doing a good job with the orchestra. I was so focused on the conducting job, about getting it right! Other than that, it was a huge honour to represent my country in this event. As almost every other Israeli, I had always watched the contest. I remember ABBA with ‘Waterloo’; wow, that song was kaboom to the head, so fresh! Then there was Izhar Cohen, who made everyone in Israel so proud by winning the contest with ‘Abanibi’. Later on, I got to work with him as a producer on one of his albums. And of course there were those big hits from the festival in Jerusalem (in 1979 – BT), ‘Hallelujah’, ‘Dschinghis Khan’, and Anne-Marie David. At the time, I was playing rock and jazz, but I liked the music of the Eurovision Song Contest as well.”
“Nothing could have prepared me for the first rehearsal with the orchestra in Dublin. The parts had been sent to Ireland weeks in advance. The orchestra had been rehearsing all the charts with their local conductor. In hindsight, my job was supposed to be easy. I didn’t have to work with a group of musicians who saw their notes for the first time. Moreover, they had also received the record version to get an impression of the sound we were looking for. In rehearsal, you were supposed to adapt some little bits here and there, nothing more. As the producer of the song, I knew exactly what I wanted to hear from the orchestra. I mean, everything was fixed… or so I thought.”
“When I counted in the orchestra for the first time, it was obvious the rhythm section had a problem with the timing, the drummer and especially the lady at the piano. The opening bars of the arrangement of our song were a piano solo, so it was very important to get it absolutely right. The timing was very strict. However, the pianist took it much too slow – if we had followed her tempo, the song would have lasted far longer than the maximum of three minutes. I think we might have crossed the four-minute line. What should I do?”
Gadi featuring on the front page of an Israeli magazine around the time of his Eurovision participation
“After trying a couple of times in vain to explain her what I was looking for, also by indicating the tempo very strictly, like a metronome, I decided to interrupt the rehearsal and have a talk with the pianist. It was a tense moment, but I had the nerve. I never got angry with her, but I could hear bystanders whispering to each other, ‘What’s he doing?’ We only had limited time to work with the orchestra – fifteen, twenty minutes, no more, so I won’t lie to you that I felt the stress. I was just thirty years old, I had never stood in front of such an orchestra, and now the first thing I had to do was stop it! The whole episode lasted some five to eight minutes, I think. It was horrible, but fortunately I had the patience to show her exactly what I was looking for. Then I walked back to the conductor’s platform. Luckily, in the second rehearsal, the rhythm section already sounded much better. By the time the general rehearsal was due, the sound was simply fantastic. The pianist got the idea, the drummer got the idea – and then we were one package. Apart from that initial hiccup, there was nothing wrong with the Irish orchestra. They were great professionals.”
“The contest in 1995 was my first and only time in Ireland. When you ask me about my impressions of the country and the people, I’m afraid I couldn’t really give you an answer. You see, I was so focused on what I had to do – especially after that first stressful rehearsal, getting our orchestration exactly right was the only thing on my mind. I vaguely remember being taken on a daytrip by train as well as on a guided tour through Dublin, but if I had stayed behind in the hotel, it would have been the same experience for me. Perhaps I’ll have the opportunity to go back to Dublin one day to discover the city and its sights. Honestly speaking, I don’t have any images in my head of what it was like.”
“One thing I do remember is that the contest itself was huge. The organisation done by the Irish was fantastic. We were taken from the hotel to the auditorium and back with a coach surrounded by three or four police cars and an additional motorcycle unit. As a conductor, I had three or four guys to accompany me to the podium. The stage was enormous and the hall was packed to the last seat on the night of the concert. Of course, the best thing for me was to stand up on that conductor’s platform listening to a sixty-something piece orchestra playing my arrangement. Wow, wow, wow, what an event to have been part of! The experience was mind-blowing.”
Gadi’s accreditation card for the contest in Dublin
“During rehearsals, I had been instructed by the Irish television crew that there was a camera on me before the song started. I was to do a bow and smile at the camera before turning to the orchestra. On the night, however, my head was strictly focused on the BPM (beats per minute – BT), about getting the tempo absolutely right at the start of the song. So that’s what you see on my face. I forgot to smile and there was just that stern, very serious look. Years later, I was invited to hold a lecture at a music school for a group of aspiring music producers. I chose to include the Eurovision video as part of a segment in the talk which was about arranging. Without mentioning beforehand that I had been involved in this Eurovision song, all of them immediately recognised that it was me taking the bow there. At that point, I paused the video to tell them what was going around in my head in those seconds. It’s a fun memory and a lovely story to share with others.”
“In the Eurovision final, the performance of the orchestra for our song was great from start to finish – and so was Liora’s. In the first rehearsal, you could feel that she was still a bit shaky, but, just like the orchestra, she greatly improved in the course of the following rehearsals. She did a great job on the song, vocally, but also performance-wise, smiling at the right moments. Applause for her! The backing group were wonderful as well. They performed the choreography to perfection and there were no mistakes in their vocal rendition either. They gave Liora the vocal backup which made the performance so convincing. Moreover, it was good for her to have the five others around. Otherwise she would have been all alone on that huge stage! I couldn’t give her any moral support, because I was twenty, thirty metres away from her with the orchestra.”
“All along, all of us were expecting to do well in the voting. If we wouldn’t win, we felt that we deserved to be in the top three for sure. I mean, our song was great and, after Liora’s performance, our confidence only grew. When we finished as number 8, with the winning song (from Norway’s Secret Garden – BT) being a piece which was nearly instrumental, we asked ourselves, ‘What, this isn’t even a song, is it?’ Yes, we were very disappointed. Shlomo Zach said to me, ‘Hey, excuse me, but they fucked up!’ Let me point out that we didn’t feel cheated. It’s a competition and this is how it works for everyone. Perhaps we lacked the connections. The juries in those days were fond of exchanging points – Sweden giving 12 points to Denmark, Denmark 12 points back to Sweden. Israel didn’t have a neighbour country to give us high marks. I don’t know, I don’t think politics was a part of this. We didn’t finish near the bottom, we didn’t make a fool of ourselves. It is what it is, it’s ok. The song was a big hit in Israel and, even today, everyone here can still sing along to it. That’s the main thing about making a song, don’t you think?”
Liora with songwriter Moshe Datz backstage in Dublin
“Liora didn’t have a huge solo career, but she is still working in the business. As it happened, I did a single with her two years ago (in 2023 – BT), nearly thirty years after the contest in Ireland. I hadn’t met her since Dublin. Then someone wrote a song for her and asked me to take care of the recording. She still is a very nice lady, just like she was at the time of the Eurovision Song Contest. Of course, she has matured as an artist. It was fun to meet her and team up again. In fact, we took part in a song festival in Ashdod with that song – and it won first prize! Good for her and good for me as her producer.”
“Looking back on Dublin, it surely was a standout moment in my career. I have never conducted such a big orchestra again – and you know what, I was the last-ever conductor to take part in the competition for Israel. In the two following years, our country didn’t take part in the contest; and Dana International in 1998 could have worked with the orchestra, but chose to work with a backing track. I’m really quite proud of that. Taking part in the contest was the experience of a lifetime, even though it didn’t change my career in any way. Some newspapers in Israel did features about me, but that was press attention limited to that one occasion, Eurovision. Years ago, a national radio station also asked me to comment on the competition twice – that’s it. Honestly, though, I wasn’t in Eurovision to win fame. Whenever I think back of the experience, I do so with a smile – exactly, the smile which I forgot to show when the camera was on me in Dublin!”
“From Dublin onwards, I’ve never had any involvement in our country’s entry or the pre-selection show here in Israel. In fact, the way the Israeli song for Eurovision is chosen has changed markedly. Dana International wasn’t chosen in an open competition – and in the following years, most of the song selections here have been internal. Sometimes, they picked one singer to perform a set of songs in a televised selection, but naturally those songs came from the pen of his or her production team. In more recent years, they’ve turned the selection of the artist into some sort of a talent show, which is very interesting to follow. I always watch it, but the song they pick in the end is usually penned by one of the jurors. Last year, there was big resentment about this among many musicians. It’s a competition that has become fenced off, everything is fixed beforehand, something which I don’t really like.”
Liora and her backing group on stage at the Point Theatre while rehearsing their Eurovision performance
“Of course, the orchestra could have no place in the Eurovision Song Contest as it is today. Even Dana International’s song, all those years ago, was done with machine drums and synthesisers. In contemporary pop music, there’s no room for an orchestra anymore. That’s progress for you! There may still be an orchestra in San Remo, but I think this is an ideological choice. I think San Remo is partly about legacy, so that’s why an orchestra is part of the setup there. I’m afraid fans of Eurovision are looking for something else. They don’t want to sit down and listen to an orchestra. Instead, most people are expecting to hear dance music, techno… and there’s some horrible music out there taking part, but most of the productions in the contest are of a high level. Usually, artists take Eurovision as an opportunity which comes along only once in their career, so they know they have to come up with a serious and quality song.”
“Sure, I know that music doesn’t always take centre-stage in modern-day pop productions. The show has become more important, but sometimes, the music takes over again – like the Dutch guy playing the piano who won it (Duncan Laurence in 2019 – BT). It’s for songs like his that I still watch the contest today. Sometimes, I skip the semis, but I wouldn’t want to miss the final. Eurovision still has a place in my heart. I know what it’s like to take part, the tension involved. Because of that, it’s easy to sympathise with the artists standing on that stage for hundreds of millions of TV viewers.”
“You know what’s so funny? I have a friend who is called Noam Inbar. A conductor by profession, he is the musical director of a military band. One day, he called me and said, ‘Hey Gadi, listen, I’ve found a website dedicated to all conductors of the Eurovision Song Contest!’ He is a Eurovision fan, so he was really excited about finding the site. ‘Ok, send me the link then,’ I replied – and, as it turned out, I was featured on it. It was a surprise to find your website; and a pleasant surprise at that. It’s nice that some people still remember the times when I took part.”
Gadi in the recording studio with Liora, meeting up for the first time since their mutual Eurovision participation (2023)
OTHER ARTISTS ABOUT GADI GOLDMAN
So far, we have not gathered comments of other artists who worked with Gadi Goldman.
EUROVISION INVOLVEMENT YEAR BY YEAR
Country – Israel
Song title – “Amen”
Rendition – Liora Fadlon
Lyrics – Hamutal Ben-Ze’ev
Composition – Moshe Datz
Studio arrangement – Gadi Goldman
Live orchestration – Gadi Goldman
Conductor – Gadi Goldman
Score – 8th place (81 votes)
SOURCES & LINKS
- Bas Tukker did an interview with Gadi Goldman, subdivided into two different sessions, December 2025
- Photos courtesy of Gadi Goldman & Ferry van der Zant
- Heartfelt thanks to Mark Coupar for proofreading the manuscript
No comments:
Post a Comment