Avishai Cohen: Naked Truth

Editor's Choice

Rating: ★★★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

Ziv Ravitz (d)
Yonathan Avishai (p)
Barak Mori (b)
Avishai Cohen (t)

Label:

ECM 3899594

March/2022

Media Format:

CD, DL

RecordDate:

Rec. September 2021

This haunting album is barely 37 minutes long, but since the trumpet-playing Avishai Cohen is a master of doing more with less – and proves it with an exquisite precision even by his own exacting standards on Naked Truth – it's hard to imagine anyone feeling shortchanged.

The trumpeter and his regular partners were always intendingto explore distillation here - inspired by the reflectiveness that lockdown isolation brought to Cohen, and his curiosity about whether a simple motif and very tightly-reined improv could spontaneously generate a suite. Personal emotions are always close to the surface with Cohen – Into The Silence reflected on his father's death, Cross My Palm With Silver on fractured Middle Eastern lives - and that quiet eloquence is more poignant than ever here. 'Part 1', the two-minute opening trumpet/bass duet, is an exquisite unfurling of soft long tones and brief flurries, as bassist Mori gently purrs around them. 'Part 2' is an entranced sway over a piano ostinato, while 'Part 3' develops in a similar form but swells to a briefly dense ensemble intensity.

A melodiously pitched Ziv Ravitz mallets solo becomes a duet with Cohen before the piano's returning ostinato spurs a crisp drum groove, brief unaccompanied drums and piano parts are followed by yearning standard-song shapes in 'Part 7' and 'Part 8' before the set closes on a restrainedly heartfelt Cohen reading of popular Israeli poet Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky's stoically wondering 'Departure'. Imagine a 1950s Miles band with all its materials and its blowing pared to the bone, and you maybe have a glimpse of how this unique session sounds.

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