Chava Alberstein is not a jazz musician. She was born December 8, 1946 in Szczecin, Poland, and immigrated to Israel with her parents in 1951. Over a career spanning more than 55 years she recorded more than 60 albums, including eight in Yiddish, more than any other Israeli singer, and became one of the most important performers of Hebrew music, Yiddish folk song, and children's music in Israel.

She has three documented jazz connections. The first is The Platina, the Israeli jazz group founded in 1971 by drummer Aharon Kaminski and Soviet emigre saxophonist Roman Kunsman. She toured with them from September 1973, a run interrupted by the Yom Kippur War and resumed that January, and the tour produced Chava Alberstein and the Platina (CBS Israel, CBS 70129, July 1974), twelve songs with Kunsman arranging most of the record. The second is The Klezmatics, the acclaimed New York klezmer band whose members bring real jazz training to their playing, with whom she recorded The Well (Di Krenitse) in 1998. Released on Xenophile Records on September 15, 1998, the album sets fifteen Yiddish poems to Alberstein's own melodies, arranged by the Klezmatics, and was named one of the ten best pop albums of 1998 by LA Weekly. The third connection is the most recent and the most complete: in April 2008 the Israeli trombonist, composer and arranger Avi Lebovich wrote the music, the arrangements and the production for her 45th studio album, טבע האדם (The Nature of Man, NMC), to lyrics by Nadav Levitan. After more than a year of sessions she sang on the record and did nothing else, giving up composing and playing on an entire album for the first time in four decades so that Lebovich's harmonic language could carry it.

Alberstein's core work sits in Hebrew and Yiddish folk song and protest song traditions, entirely outside jazz. The Well is the one point of real overlap with this project: a collaboration with a band that treats klezmer through a jazz-trained improviser's lens, applied to her own melodies and a set of somber, carefully chosen Yiddish texts about loneliness, loss, displacement, and death.