Israeli trumpeter Avisahi Cohen’s graceful yet warmly vibrant new album arrives just a year after his ECM debut Into the Silence and it is pure delight, despite deadly serious undertones that the musician certainly intends on track one.
The five-track album opens with the mellifluously Milesian Will I Die, Miss? Will I Die? That title certainly stopped this reviewer in his tracks on learning that such was the very question asked by a young boy of a nurse in Aleppo following the gas attack in that ill-fated city last November.
Obviously such a title reference, once learned by the listener, makes one try and listen differently to what is, no matter what way you imbibe it, alertly wistful beauty in the shape of ten minutes and 20 seconds. There are vague shades of Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain on this beguiling record which was recorded in Israel with hugley talented friends, Barak Mori on double bass, Nasheet Waits on drums and Yanatahn Avishai on piano.
"I’m affected by what happens in my country and in the world, " says Cohen. "And by how politics divides us as people. At least to me, this music raises some question about what it is we are here to do. There’s a beautiful phrase in Judaism: if you save one soul it’s as if you saved the whole world. Change should start from there. Each of us should do whatever we can to be compassionate. I don’t know how much the music represents that, but that’s what I was feeling when I was writing it."
Much of the record has a broody poignancy in light of the just-quoted remarks, yet 50 Years and Counting seems upbeat and positive, even mildlly playful. Shoot Me in the Leg - another curious title - flaunts insouciant flourishes but then wanders into baleful, murky territory, adumbrated by Nasheet Waits’ piano. Yet the exercise draws to a close with a solo horn flourish that is, in its own way, tender and kindly.
Throughout, Cohen’s trumpet soars with dignity and presence above the band’s sympathetic foundation. His is a kind of ethereal sense, a softly angular architecture that never loses the beating human heart or gets ice on its wings in the upper stratosphere.
A very fine record indeed from a gifted trumpeter with a distinct Middle Eastern or Eastern Meditterranean tinge to the gently rolling rhythms that predominate.
Paddy Kehoe
