When describing trumpeter Avishai Cohen, The Guardian said “every generation of jazz trumpeters revisits the legacy of Miles Davis in their own ways, but the Israeli rising star Avishai Cohen’s version of the journey has been particularly skillful.” In 2017, a year after his impressionistic, award winning, and critically-lauded ECM debut Into The Silence, Cohen’s sophomore release for ECM Cross My Palm With Silver introduced audiences to a new collection of pieces highlighting his exceptional quartet. 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 Ziv Ravitz, 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 and Naked Truth were produced by Manfred Eicher at Studios La Buissonne in the south of France.
The trumpeter began performing in public in 1988 at age 10, playing his first solos with a big band and eventually touring with the Young Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra to perform under the likes of maestros Zubin Mehta, Kurt Masur and Kent Nagano. Having worked with Israeli folk and pop artists in his native country and appeared on television early on, Cohen arrived as an experienced professional musician when he took up a full scholarship at Berklee College of Music in Boston. In 1997, the young musician established an international reputation by placing third in the Thelonious Monk Jazz Trumpet Competition. Avishai came of age as a jazz player as part of the fertile scene at the club Smalls in New York’s West Village.
Cohen is now globally recognized as a musician with an individual sound and a questing spirit, an ever-creative player-composer open to multiple strains of jazz and active as a leader, co-leader and sideman. Aside from the acclaimed work with his quartet over the last several years, and previously his trio work under the moniker Triveni, the trumpeter has also recorded and toured the world as part of the Mark Turner Quartet, the SFJAZZ Collective, Jazz100 (with Danilo Perez, Chris Potter, etc.) Zakir Hussain, and the 3 Cohens Sextet – with his sister, clarinetist-saxophonist Anat, and brother, saxophonist Yuval. Cohen’s electric project BIG VICIOUS, featuring two guitarists and two drummers, has won a devoted audience at international festivals. Named as the Artistic Director of the International Jerusalem Festival, Cohen has also been voted a Rising Star on three consecutive occasions in the DownBeat Critics Poll.
It’s impossible not to hear the beauty of the music performed by the trumpeter Avishai Cohen and his Quartet of long-time close friends. With his open and warm tone and his narrated-energy and balance, his serene compositions sound more powerful and emotional than on the albums he has recorded for ECM the past decade. With the recent sneak-peak of his new album Ashes to Gold (release September 27, 2024 on ECM Records) in a sold out Vredenburg concert hall in The Netherlands, Cohen proved to be absolute in form, presenting his new and forthcoming Suite. It is of breathless beauty – recorded in November 2023, one month after the Israel-Gaza war started.
With unhidden emotion Cohen dedicated his new Suite to an immediate cease fire in which he added that music speaks louder than words. What followed was of special and rare expressiveness, which one does not find or hear easily in music these days. Starting out slowly on flute with a soft and warm theme, which with a turn of his trumpet changed into a stormy and dark passage filled with unrest, dark piano chords, heavy bass and hard drums. Impossible not to think about what is happening in the Middle-East as we speak. Gripping how Cohen plays with the pedals of his trumpet, accentuating despair, in conversation with his band, especially the narratives each band member tells. Cohen brought it all together.
The title of his new album is “Ashes To Gold” but the mere confidence, narrative power and emotion, made this concert a small miracle.
AVISHAI COHEN & YONATHAN AVISHAI DUO
Trumpeter Avishai Cohen and pianist Yonathan Avishai have been outstanding global jazz ambassadors throughout their careers, performing in the top jazz clubs and festivals from New York to Tokyo, after meeting as boys in their shared home of Tel Aviv. The two musicians have known each other for over two decades and founded the quartet Third World Love together in 2002. Now living in France, Yonathan Avishai’s lyrical piano playing can be heard on his friend Avishai Cohen’s highly praised ECM releases Into The Silence, Cross My Palm With Silver & Naked Truth. With a tremendous and intensively focused sound on trumpet, Cohen’s improvisations skillfully brings to life the spirit of such jazz icons as Don Cherry, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman. Now, for the first time, Avishai Cohen and Yonathan Avishai perform as a duo with jazz standards and original compositions (Playing the Room, recorded by Manfred Eicher and released on ECM in the Fall of 2019), which fascinatingly reflects the world-music-rich experience of the two musicians.
AVISHAI COHEN BIG VICIOUS
Trumpeter Avishai Cohen, voted a Rising Star in the 2012 DownBeat Critics Poll, has earned renown as a musician with an individual sound and a questing spirit, an ever-creative player-composer open to multiple strains of jazz and active internationally as a leader, co-leader and sideman. The New York Times described him as ‘an assertive, accomplished trumpeter with a taste for modernism’ as well as ‘an extravagantly skilled trumpeter, relaxed and soulful. . . deftly combining sensitivity and flair.’
Big Vicious, a genre-bending venture by trumpeter Avishai Cohen, originated from several Lower East Side jam sessions. The initial premise was to build instrumental songs based on rock riffs, using a mirrored rhythm section (in this final incarnation two guitars, and two drummers) with Cohen leading and layering his distinctive trumpet melodies both inside and over the band. The resulting music is a combination of composed motifs, rock backbeats, and jazz improvisation that works both in a small dark club and an open-air festival stage.
