Recording of April 2016: Into the Silence

Avishai Cohen: Into the Silence
Performance ****½
Sonics ****½


But Cohen's recent recordings, such as Flood, Triveni II, and Dark Nights, all released by Anzic Records, have been too strong to ignore. Proof that he has arrived is his signing by ECM, the company most alert to emerging jazz talent. Into the Silence is Cohen's ECM debut. Some will attribute its rapt atmosphere to the influence of producer Manfred Eicher. In fact, its aura of finality derives from a passage in Cohen's life: the death of his father, in November 2014.

The ensemble includes Israeli pianist Yonathan Avishai and three Americans: tenor saxophonist Bill McHenry, bassist Eric Revis, and drummer Nasheet Waits. The instrumentation is atypically conventional for a Cohen band, and the album is the closest thing to a pure-jazz project, and less ethnic, than anything in his previous work. But Into the Silence is not conventional. It is intimate and individual. It opens with "Life and Death." Despite the daunting title, the piece does not feel grandiose or heavy. It is a series of fragile meditations that evolve in response to tides of emotion. Cohen is a technically brilliant, boldly imaginative trumpet player, but someday he may be known as a composer who also plays an instrument. The spare melody of "Life and Death" gets under your skin. Cohen repeats and extends it, the sound of his muted trumpet identical with loneliness and loss. This act of mourning for his father sometimes almost stops, from sadness, but always perseveres.

It is surprising to read, in press notes, that these compositions were new to the players when they gathered in the recording studio. Even Cohen had lived with these themes, composed in the six months following his father's passing, "just in his head or at the piano." The music sounds born in the moment, yet sustains the unity of a through-composed suite. In the title track, as in everything here, everyone fills a role. Yonathan Avishai's piano introduces tension through dissonance; Waits's foreboding drums clatter and erupt; Revis's throbbing bass connects with Waits's bass-drum continuum; Cohen and McHenry piece out the melody between them, or press it hard in unisons. McHenry, a new Cohen collaborator, is remarkably in touch with the spiritual forces underlying this album. He plays with fervent restraint.

Every modern trumpet player must come to terms with Miles Davis. Cohen speaks his own trumpet language with his own cultural inflections. But his sound, with or without a mute, brings back Davis's mystery and melancholy in long trumpet calls like sighs of the soul. Cohen's lines are instantly mutable because the emotions they portray are complex. Cohen the trumpet improviser alters and deepens the ideas of Cohen the composer.

The centerpiece is the 16-minute "Dream Like a Child." Cohen's father had wanted to play music when he was young, but his family could not afford lessons. He made sure that his children got those lessons. The most dramatic of the song's many turns occurs at 7:00, when it changes from a ballad to an assertive anthem, perhaps representing the handoff within the family to a new generation. This is the track that allows fire into the album's solemnity. Cohen shoots trumpet flares that light the dark sky.

Three stellar, essential contributors to this project must be singled out. Engineers Gérard de Haro and Nicolas Baillard, working in Studios La Buissonne in the south of France, achieve clean, objective sound that never calls attention to itself, but allows the personal, universal message of this music to stand clear. Pianist Yonathan Avishai is entrusted to close the suite with a stunning, radiant, three-minute solo called "Life and Death—Epilogue." It is a deep reflection on and summation of the album's emotional journey. It acknowledges sorrow, but its passionate, slow ascent arrives at acceptance.—Thomas Conrad

Allen Fant's picture

A great one! TC.

crenca's picture

That is, they don't allow any of their albums on streaming (Tidal fer sur, but I don't think they allow their albums/artists on any streaming service). I purchased one ECM album in the past and was disappointed. Fool me once, shame on me and all that.

ECM will not sell me another album unless I can hear a bit of it first - and that means streaming...

Loren's picture

This specific recording is available on iTunes to buy and listen to samples of. Other recordings by Avishai Cohen are available on the iTunes subscription service. I hope learning about this allows you to further explore his music.

crenca's picture

That said, while I have purchased a handful of albums based on "samples" (for example, from HDTracks) it is the exception because I usually find the samples to be too short and of too low quality (not sure what the bitrate is, but the music always sounds off to say the least).

I am not normally a user of Apple products of any kind, services, software, or hardware - the premium they demand over equavilant Android, Microsoft, etc. I find excessive.

Still, I have heard good things about this artist so perhaps I will....(2 minutes later)...Nope, they require a download to my PC - will not stream over HTML - not that interested.

ECM should work with other less restrictive streaming services - such as Tidal which allows me to stream with a browser...

Loren's picture

If you'd like to at least listen to samples, it's on iTunes to 'buy'. It isn't part of iTunes music subscription service. That being said, several of Avishai Cohen's recordings are, so you can listen to much of his work and learn more about him that way.