Avishai Cohen (trumpet) at Dazzle Jazz Club

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 new album, Naked Truth (released in 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. For most of its length the Israeli trumpeter painstakingly leads the way, closely shadowed by 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...

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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 new album, Naked Truth (released in 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. For most of its length the Israeli trumpeter painstakingly leads the way, closely shadowed by 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. 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.”“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

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