Yonatan Gat at home in his studio (Photo: Nicole Disser)
Before meeting the guy, I envisioned Yonatan Gat as some latter-day guitar god, a reincarnation of that tradition of males whose sole purpose in life is to descend from the heavens (or in this case, Israel) at the permanent age of 27 to spend a brief but divine moment here on Earth, shredding away. I wasn’t alone– Yonatan Gat has been dubbed a “composer,” referred to as a “world music-inspired maestro,” and compared to Jimi Hendrix. It seems that whoever’s looking at him perceives Gat as rock-idol progeny. So when I found myself walking up to an actual castle in Brooklyn Heights, my suspicions seemed all but confirmed.