Biography

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.” 

Most of the “Ashes to Gold” suite was ultimately drafted in the compressed time period of a week, “by this point in the full craziness of wartime. With rockets flying over my head, alarms and sirens going off, and so on.  Did all of this affect the music? How could it not?” Accordingly, the suite runs the gamut of emotions, from enraged to wary to profoundly melancholic, and draws forth moving performances in each of its expressive registers.  On tour, Cohen was still adding sections to the music and using sound-checks to rehearse them. “After a rehearsal in Romania, I knew I was missing a theme. I had the timbre and the sound of it in my mind but I still had to write it.  The local promoter found me a studio that had a small Casio in it, and I wrote the music on that.” This became Part III of the suite, where Avishai’s tenderly lyrical line floats above the grave meditation of double bass and piano.

The input of the group, all gifted players long attuned to Cohen’s sound world, was different than on Avishai’s earlier ECM recordings, Into The Silence, Cross My Palm With Silver, and Naked Truth. “Generally, in the past the band didn’t see the music until the studio. And my attitude was often ‘Well, this is what I’ve written, so do what you do: give me your improvisational interpretation’. But this time Yonathan and Barak got to look at some of the music before we left Israel and we then had about a week to work on it, in a much more detailed way than previously.  I was never as specific about what I wanted to hear on an album as this time. Every drum beat, every rhythmic emphasis, every crescendo was discussed and defined. How the notes should be played and placed and phrased, exactly what each of us would be doing in each section…”

The melodic directness of the album’s concluding piece “The Seventh”, composed by Avishai Cohen’s teenaged daughter Amalia, offers consoling contrast to the suite’s complexity.  “I loved her melody, and I thought it could really fit on the album after all that intense music, and it was a melody that I would never have written, you know. So I secretly recorded her playing the piece and brought the tune to the band, and we surprised her by featuring it at the shows before the studio session.”

Bridging the works by the two Cohens is a performance of the haunting Adagio assai from Maurice Ravel’s G Major piano concerto. The quartet has frequently included it in their concerts. Written between 1929 and 1931,  Ravel’s concerto drew influence from Mozart and Saint-Saens as well as from jazz, spirituals, and Basque folk themes, forward-looking in its transcultural considerations.  It is a composition Avishai Cohen has long admired. “I listened to it practically non-stop through the Covid years, especially Martha Argerich’s version.  At home I would play along to Martha’s recording of it.” Last year Cohen and Yonathan Avishai were invited to appear in Argerich’s festival at Hamburg’s Laieszhalle, and the trumpeter had the opportunity to perform Ravel with the charismatic classical pianist: “That was amazing. A great honour, and one of the highlights of my musical life.”

Ashes to Gold was recorded at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines in November 2023. Further recordings with Avishai Cohen are in preparation.