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Artist: Avishai Cohen
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Avishai Cohen:

Ashes to Gold

The first moments of “Ashes to Gold” – the dramatic five-part suite which opens Avishai Cohen’s new album – feature the unfamiliar sound of the great Tel Aviv trumpeter playing flute, establishing a dreamlike, almost pastoral ambience soon to be torn apart. What follows is some of the most intense and concentrated music Cohen and his band of friends have recorded to date, mirroring the deep tensions of a troubled era.

Ashes to Gold: the title imagery is drawn from the old Japanese art of kintsugi, the ceramic repair work “where you take the old and the broken and try and put the pieces back together, to make something golden and beautiful from the fragments,” says Avishai Cohen.  “In a way I think that’s where we dwell. Our reality. And although this music can’t help but reflect the times, it also – in my wishful imagination - has some hope to it. At least, it is not only dark.”

Last autumn, Cohen had intended to take a month off in Israel to write the music for his new album, and to play the pieces at concerts en route to the recording session in the South of France.  The cataclysmic events of October 7, however, brought composing plans to an abrupt halt:

“I could not write anything. I couldn’t touch the trumpet. In the beginning of November, I told Yonathan [pianist Yonathan Avishai] that I was going to have to cancel the tour and the recording, but he said ‘No. We need to go and play music’. The way he said it was powerful. I knew he was right.”  

Avishai Cohen:

Naked Truth

There is a searching, yearning quality to Naked Truth, and a raw beauty and vulnerability in Avishai Cohen’s trumpet sound throughout. Very much music-of-the moment, found and shaped in the course of a remarkable recording session in the South of France, Naked Truth takes the form of an extemporaneous suite. For most of its length the Israeli trumpeter painstakingly leads the way, closely shadowed by his long-time comrades – pianist Yonathan Avishai, bassist Barak Mori and drummer Ziv Ravitz - who share an intuitive understanding, hyper alert to the music’s subtly-changing emphases. At the album’s conclusion, Cohen recites “Departure”, a poem by Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky, whose themes of renunciation, acceptance and letting go seem optimally-attuned to the mood of the music.

Avishai describes the album as the outcome of a “two-year meditation. I had been sitting with the main motif of Naked Truth since the start of Covid. The eight note motif you hear at the start of Part II was the beginning of the whole process. I wouldn’t say the motif has been ‘haunting’ me exactly, but it’s been accompanying me through this whole period and everything that I came to assemble for the album revolved around those eight notes and all the possibilities within them. 

“And as I explored that, a lot of other questions were coming up, as I asked myself what do I want to say in the music, what do I need to say. And the process also came to reflect a personal, emotional journey.” There were two parallel stories unfolding, he elaborates, the search for the compositional framework, and something more existential.

Naked Truth was recorded at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, in September 2021, and produced by Manfred Eicher.

Avishai Cohen:

Big Vicious

Charismatic trumpeter Avishai Cohen launched his homegrown band Big Vicious six years ago, after relocating from the US to his native Israel, rounding up friends to shape the music from the ground up. Guitarist Uzi Ramirez, bassist Jonathan Albalak and drummer Aviv Cohen write much of the material together with Avishai. Ziv Ravitz, from Avishai's acoustic quartet, was recruited as second drummer a year ago. "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.