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.
Trumpeter Avishai Cohen’s ECM debut, 2016’s Into the Silence, is a ruminative, elegiac album far — if not completely — removed from the kinetic, aggressive post-bop of his 2014 effort, Dark Nights. As with all ECM releases, Into the Silence was produced by label founder Manfred Eicher and, as such, fits nicely into the catalog next to works by the late trumpeter Kenny Wheeler and others. In some ways, Cohen’s move toward a more classical, ambient sound makes sense, as he is recording material specifically with the ECM stylistic tradition in mind. Sadly, Cohen also composed these songs in the wake of his father’s death, and the trumpeter’s grief seems to permeate everything on Into the Silence. He even bookends the album with the funereal “Life and Death,” in which he moans, Miles Davis-like, through muted trumpet, his band in a slow march beside him. Joining Cohen here are avant-garde-friendly saxophonist Bill McHenry and several longtime associates, pianist Yonathan Avishai, bassist Eric Revis, and drummer Nasheet Waits. The group members have an organic, focused intensity as if they hang on each phrase together. This intensity is well matched by Eicher’s production, which sounds typically warm and full of natural reverb, as if recorded in a church instead of Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, France. Other tracks, like the slowly rolling “Dream Like a Child” and the quietly discordant “Behind the Broken Glass,” also benefit from this group interplay, with Cohen leading his band through ambient soundscapes that, much like one’s emotions after the death of a loved one, are supple and sad one minute, and sharp and tangled the next. ~~ AllMusic Review by Matt Collar
Tracklist:
01. Avishai Cohen – Life And Death (09:18)
02. Avishai Cohen – Dream Like A Child (15:30)
03. Avishai Cohen – Into The Silence (12:12)
04. Avishai Cohen – Quiescence (05:10)
05. Avishai Cohen – Behind The Broken Glass (08:12)
06. Avishai Cohen – Life And Death – Epilogue (02:42)
