The bushy bearded trumpeter from New York is the lesser known of the Israeli jazz Avishai Cohens. But that might be about to change; Already establishing his name on the international festival circuit with his group Triveni (Omar Avital and Nasheet Waits) and the SF Jazz Collective, he makes his debut for the illustrious ECM label. With his work in a generally more swaggering yet cool straight ahead post-bop context, he might not seem a natural fit for the label.

But Manfred Eicher’s muse in the recording studio seems to be an encouragement to certain artists, take Tim Berne’s recent output for example, to discover new approaches to studio music-making. It’s evidenced here too on an album aptly titled Into the Silence. Cohen with his soulful, vocalised tonal nuances and inventively coherent phrasing, is given the space to stretch out through a series of six compositions in which the band’s patient development of Cohen’s thematic sketches capture an elevated, airy ebb-and-flow. Alongside echoes of the Miles Davis of Kind of Blue and 1960’s free bop period, Cohen as well occasionally hints at the broody atmosphere of Tomasz Stanko’s takes on the work of the classical influenced film composer Krzysztof Komeda. Fellow Israeli and France- based pianist Yonathon Avishai’s Debussy-like piano interventions and Cohen’s semitic origins provide diversions. Yet Cohen’s quartet achieve to transcend their influences in what is a mesmerising exchange of ideas.