Avishai Cohen Quartet

Avishai Cohen is globally recognized as a musician with an individual sound and inquisitive spirit, a creative player-composer open to multiple strains of jazz. In his new album, Naked Truth, you’ll find a raw beauty and vulnerability in Avishai Cohen’s trumpet sound. 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 duration the Israeli trumpeter painstakingly leads the way, closely shadowed by his long-time comrades — pianist Yonathan Avishai, bass player Barak Mori and drummer Ziv Ravitz — who share an intuitive understanding, hyper alert to the music’s subtly-changing emphases.

His ‘dream team’ quartet

After his award winning debut ‘Into The Silence‘, Cohen’s sophomore release ‘Cross My Palm With Silver‘ introduced audiences to his exceptional quartet. The skillful, almost telepathic interplay among the musicians allows Avishai Cohen to soar on the newest album. “All of these people together are my dream team”, says the charismatic trumpeter of fellow players Yonathan Avishai, Barak Mori and Ziv Ravitz. “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.”

Eight notes it all it takes

Avishai describes the new 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.

“Like Miles Davis he can make the trumpet a vehicle for uttering the most poignant human cries”

– Thomas Conrad, JazzTimes