Avishai Cohen is 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. In his latest release, Naked Truth (2022), you 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. Together with 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. Avishai describes the album as the outcome of a “two-year meditation.
Excitingly, a new chapter is on the horizon as Avishai Cohen prepares to unveil his upcoming album on ECM soon.
Opening the evening is singer, harpist, and choir conductor Sophye Soliveau. Nurtured on Afro-American music since childhood, she studied classical harp and choral singing at the Conservatoire. Since then, she has broken out of the narrow confines of classical education, moving into soul, jazz and gospel.
“Cohen is a multicultural jazz musician, among whose ancestors is Miles Davis. Like Davis, he can make the trumpet a vehicle for uttering the most poignant human cries.” — Thomas Conrad, JazzTimes
