It takes guts for an artist to speak out against their own government, but Avishai Cohen, the Tel Aviv-based trumpeter, recently told an audience that he wanted “an immediate cease fire” in Israel’s war on Gaza. Just before this music was recorded, he says, he was adding the finishing touches “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?”

The impression of war is certainly conveyed from the start, as the tom-toms rumble like not-so-distant bombs, the snare drum rattles along in a fragmented march, and the trumpet becomes both the advancing military and the wailing civilian population.

Seemingly reversing the album’s title, the ominous, downbeat quality of the two opening tunes makes them feel more like ‘Gold to Ashes’, particularly Mori’s minor key arco descent at the end of ‘Ashes to Gold Part I’, which continues through the beginning of ‘Part II’. By the time we get to ‘Part V’ (the final and longest part) the mood has lightened, as pianist Avishai unleashes a sequence of fast arpeggios under Cohen’s trumpet.

The album concludes in a sweeter mood, and the classical feel of the earlier tracks is also evident in the only non-original, Ravel’s mellow waltz-time ‘Adagio Asai’ (from his ‘G Major Piano Concerto’), while the brief final track (‘The Seventh’), its sweet piano melody written by Cohen’s teenage daughter Amalia, is underpinned by a repeated high single bass note from Mori.