Yosef Gutman Levitt was born Gary Levitt in 1979 on a farm in Knoppieslaagte, South Africa. He started piano as a child, then picked up bass guitar at sixteen after hearing Jaco Pastorius with Weather Report. A self-arranged version of the South African national anthem won him a scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he studied under educator Hal Crook and graduated magna cum laude in 2001. He moved to New York after graduating, worked the jazz circuit alongside contemporaries including guitarist Lionel Loueke and drummer Ziv Ravitz, played with guitarist Ben Monder, and composed roughly a hundred pieces of commercial music for The Oprah Winfrey Show while working as a busboy to fund his gigging.

He became a baal teshuva — a returnee to religious observance — after an encounter with Israeli travelers on a Brooklyn subway train. Around 2007 he co-founded the email-marketing startup Mad Mimi with his brother; it was acquired by GoDaddy in 2014, and music largely receded during this period. He moved to Jerusalem in 2009, and by around 2018 had returned seriously to music, adopting a custom five-string acoustic bass guitar built by Harvey Citron with input from bassist Steve Swallow — carved from solid mahogany with a spruce top — that became his signature instrument.

His return to recording accelerated from 2022, when he began a close collaboration with pianist Omri Mor, producing two trio/quartet albums with drummer Ofri Nehemya, arranged and produced alongside his frequent collaborator Gilad Ronen: Upside Down Mountain (2022) and Melodies of Light (2023), the latter built from Mor/Nehemya duo improvisations that Levitt and Ronen shaped into finished compositions afterward. He founded his own label, Soul Song Records, and has released steadily since: Soul Song (2023) with guitarist Lionel Loueke, Mor and Nehemya; River of Eden (2024), a collaboration with American composer Peter Broderick featuring cellist Yoed Nir; The World and Its People (2024); Unity (2024), a duo with guitarist Itay Sher; and Shir Yedidot (2025), featuring pianist Yonathan Avishai and drummer Amir Bresler. He also keeps a standing duo with Brooklyn-based Israeli guitarist Tal Yahalom, producing two albums of Hasidic nigunim together, Tal Yasis (2021) and Tsuf Harim (2023, reviewed by Jazzwise), neither of which is catalogued on Discogs under either artist's entity (see discography-full.md). He lives in Jerusalem with his wife and eight children.

Levitt's catalogue is best described as spiritual jazz in the devotional sense — most of his post-2019 output sets Hasidic nigunim (wordless Jewish melodies) and other liturgical material rather than jazz standards or secular original compositions, and Discogs itself files most of his releases under "Jazz, Folk, World & Country" rather than plain jazz. This is genuinely jazz-adjacent rather than straight-ahead: the personnel are established jazz musicians (Omri Mor, Yonathan Avishai, Amir Bresler, Lionel Loueke) working in an improvisation-based trio/quartet format, and jazz press (All About Jazz, Jazz Journal, Bass Magazine) covers him consistently, but at least one reviewer (All About Jazz's Mike Jurkovic, on Melodies of Light) explicitly resisted calling the music jazz outright, describing it instead as hypnotic and genre-transcending. His playing itself draws on Steve Swallow's melodic approach to the electric/acoustic bass guitar, a direct line audible in his choice of a custom Swallow-adjacent instrument.