Avishai Cohen

Avishai Cohen – Naked Truth (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 35:05 minutes | 627 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

To those who are still wondering about the meaning of improvisation, Naked Truth give solid clues. Now well settled at ECM, trumpeter Avishai Cohen signs here an album driven by his senses, his inspiration and his free exchanges with his old compatriot accomplices the pianist Yonathan Avishai, the bassist Barak Mori and the drummer Ziv Ravitz. A short suite (35 minutes) in nine movements, recorded at La Buissonne studios in Pernes-les-Fontaines, in September 2021, and produced by Mr. ECM, Manfred Eicher. A work advancing in hushed steps, quite close to poetry in its narrative form. The disc also closes with the trumpeter reciting the poem Departure written by his compatriot Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky … Rarely had the four musicians wandered like this. Their complicity is such that even in moments when the contours of the themes seem blurred, the music remains total. Often soothed, as if in weightlessness. And always bewitching.
(more…)

Avishai Cohen – Dark Nights (2014/2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 53:22 minutes | 967 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Anzic Records, LLC

From the brooding opening title track to the closing Chet Baker homage, “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” Dark Nights unapologetically embraces the heart of jazz. Every aspect of the album from the cover photo, to Cohen’s precise trumpet inflections, to the trio’s dedication to immediacy and collective improvisation (and even the album’s forays into electronic affects) is saturated with the emblematic textures, rhythms, and imagery of jazz. This is achieved with professionalism, creativity, and skill, without a wit of irony or cliché, while avoiding both navel-gazing insularity and crowd-pleasing revivalism.
(more…)

Avishai Cohen – Cross My Palm With Silver (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 38:47 minutes | 698 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © ECM

A year after his impressionistic, critically-lauded ECM debut Into The Silence, trumpeter Avishai Cohen’s Cross My Palm With Silver introduces a programme of new pieces which put the focus on the ensemble, on teamwork, with a quartet of the highest calibre. The adroit, almost telepathic interplay among the musicians allows Avishai Cohen to soar, making it clear why he is one of the most talked-about jazz musicians on the contemporary scene. “All of these people together are my dream team”, says the charismatic trumpeter of fellow players Yonathan Avishai, Barak Mori and Nasheet Waits, who share his sense for daring improvisation and his feeling for structure. “I feel we’re in a perfect place with the balance. It’s open and there’s so much room for the improvisation to take the music any place we can. At the same time the composition is very specific and the vibe is very direct and thought about.” As with Into The Silence, Cross My Palm With Silver was produced by Manfred Eicher at Studios La Buissonne in the south of France. It is issued on the eve of a major European tour, with concerts in France, Italy, Spain, Luxembourg, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands.
(more…)

Avishai Cohen – Seven Seas (2011)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 47:00 minutes | 505 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Parlophone (France)

Now one of the most popular jazz players of the past decade, Avishai Cohen takes his artistic approach to its zenith, with Seven Seas. Featuring nursery rhymes, lullabies and suites in which heroic inspiration and symphonics abound. Seven Seas plunges us into a fabulous sound voyage, in which understatement and magnitude play a never-ending game of ping-pong, a trip that easily transposes to the silver screen. Once you get past the opening credits dripping in joyful nostalgia, you steer past isles of rhythm and continents of sound, winding up with a traditional piano ladino with Cohen’s intense vocals.

Cohen has reached a new pinnacle as an artist. It’s more of a fusion album, perhaps bringing us closer to reality of an odyssey, with its title that transports us into nautical legend: seven seas’ many twists and turns make it the most exciting of albums in Cohen’s discography.
(more…)

Avishai Cohen – Into The Silence (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 53:07 minutes | 966 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © ECM

Avishai Cohen impressed a lot of listeners with his soulful contributions to Mark Turner’s Lathe of Heaven album in 2014. Now the charismatic Tel Aviv-born trumpeter has his ECM leader debut in a programme of expansive and impressionistic compositions for jazz quartet (trumpet, piano, bass, drums), augmented by tenor saxophone on a few pieces. Into The Silence is dedicated to the memory of Avishai’s father David, reflecting upon the last days of his life with grace and restraint. Avishai’s tender muted trumpet sets the emotional tone of the music in the album’s opening moments and his gifted cast of musicians explore its implications. Israeli pianist Yonathan Avishai has played with Cohen in many settings and solos creatively inside the trumpeter’s haunting compositions, sometimes illuminating them with the phraseology of the blues. Cohen and drummer Nasheet Waits have a hypersensitive understanding and their interaction can, from moment to moment, recall the heyday of Miles Davis and Tony Williams or Don Cherry and Billy Higgins. Yet this music, while acknowledging inspirational sources, is very much of our time. Bassist Eric Revis, a cornerstone of the Branford Marsalis quartet for two decades, provides elegant support throughout. And saxophonist Bill McHenry, a subtle modernist who has worked with Paul Motian and Andrew Cyrille, shadows Cohen’s lines with feeling. Into The Silence was recorded at Studios La Buissonne in the South of France in July 2015 and produced by Manfred Eicher.
(more…)

Avishai Cohen – Big Vicious (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 50:30 minutes | 984 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © ECM

Charismatic trumpeter Avishai Cohen launched his exuberant, home-grown band Big Vicious six years ago, after relocating from the US to his native Israel, rounding up players to shape the music from the ground up, and co-authoring much of its newest material together with them. The group is an association of old friends. “We’re all coming from jazz, but some of us left it earlier”, Avishai says, summing up the stylistic reach of his cohorts. “Everyone’s bringing in their backgrounds, and that becomes part of the sound of the band.” Textures from electronica, ambient music and psychedelia are part of the blend, so too grooves and beats from rock, pop, trip-hop and more. A wide-open approach to cover versions – from Massive Attack to Beethoven – is also integral to the Vicious vision. Recorded in Studios La Buissonne in the South of France in August 2019 and produced by Manfred Eicher, Big Vicious’s debut album is issued as the band gears up for extensive international touring.
(more…)

Avishai Cohen – Arvoles (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 41:26 minutes | 812 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © naïve

‘Arvoles’ (‘Trees’ in the ancient Ladino-language).
Full of original instrumental compositions, and one traditional song written over the last couple of years. The music’s been clearly identified with his own unique and defining DNA. “It’s impossible to escape from myself, even if I would want to.” And so his dynamic influences remain. There are traces of classical music and Afro-Caribbean rhythms. There’s bebop and hard bop, swing and hiphop. But with every new album his own personality shines through more emphatically. ‘Recorded with his core trio, drummer Noam David (Israel) and pianist Elchin Shirinov (Azerbaijan) both magnificent musicians and composers in their own right. ‘’Most of these compositions seem to deal with looking back. There’s even horns in there, Björn Samuelsson (trombone) and Anders Hagberg (flute) which I hadn’t included in my writing for some time. You could say I’m going back to basics, but with the maturity and vision that the last couple of decades have brought me. Nostalgia at its best is the strongest, most romantic, sincere, bitter-sweet feeling. And I agree it’s all over the record, with compositions like ‘Childhood’, ‘New York ‘90’s’ and ‘Nostalgia’.
(more…)

Avishai Cohen – Almah (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 43:36 minutes | 914 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Parlophone (France)

This lyrical jazz/classical crossover set from the Israeli composer, bassist and singer glows with seductive songs, from its luxuriously harmonised classical overture, via Israeli and Sephardic folk materials to his quietly ecstatic folk-vocal finale. Almah also features pianist Nitai Hershkovits, drummer Ofri Nehemya, and the unique oboe and cor anglais improviser Yoram Lachish, alongside violin, violas and cello. Cohen’s Song for My Brother unfolds in a rolling trance, pivoting on an emphatic bass break, On a Black Horse veers between wistful baroque symmetry and implacable string-group funk, and Thad Jones’ A Child Is Born gains new resonances from the contrast between Lachish’s plaintive reeds and Cohen’s bass. There are gliding oboe lullabies, pounding Arab dances, and the hip-hoppish Shlosre is a fiendish rhythmic workout for the jazz trio at the core of this band. It’s genre-blending music from a conventional melodist’s angle, but made with a real sensitivity to its ingredients.
(more…)

Avishai Cohen – 1970 (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 45:36 minutes | 501 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Masterworks

His escapades towards soul, pop and folk music are not completely new. Except that with1970, Avishai Cohen jumps feet first with a whole album into… soul, pop and folk music! The Israeli bass player admittedly never forgets the jazz soul in his music; he simply pays homage here to sounds, textures and universes that he grew up with. A mostly sung journey (both in English and in Hebrew) that he undertakes with numerous guests such as Itamar Doari on percussion, Yael Shapira on cello, Elyasaf Bishari on oud, Tal Kohavi on drums, Yonatan Daskal on keyboards and Karen Malka at the microphone. As Avishai Cohen says it himself: “it’s not a jazz record. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve always had a connection to pop. I like pop as much as I like Bach and Charlie Parker. Singing has become very serious in my life over time. I’ve been asked by many people, when is the vocal album gonna come? Well, this is it, right here.
(more…)