Avishai Cohen - Ashes to Gold, E.U. ECM Records – ECM 2822, Vinyl LP

Avishai Cohen - Ashes to Gold

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Ashes to Gold Review by Matt Collar 

Trumpeter Avishai Cohen embodies the emotions of living through war, moving from anger to anguish, and finally hope, on his sixth ECM album, 2024's Ashes to Gold. The album, which features a five-part suite, was recorded in November 2023, but largely composed a month before in the wake of the cataclysmic events of October 7th and Israel's conflict with Hamas. While the Israeli-born jazz artist initially thought he was too emotionally overwrought to play or write anything, he quickly realized his need to put his feelings into music. The result is a musical rumination on the tragedy of war and the hope that humanity may yet find peaceful resolutions to such conflicts (at a 2024 Netherlands concert, Cohen purportedly dedicated his new suite to an immediate ceasefire). Helping Cohen bring his cathartic music to life is his acoustic quartet featuring pianist Yonathan Avishai, bassist Barak Mori, and drummer Ziv Ravitz. This is the same group that appeared on his equally introspective 2022 album Naked Truth. However, where that album was a fully improvised recording, Ashes to Gold is a thoughtfully composed chamber suite, one that balances a classical lyricism with moments of boldly searching improvisation. With his burnished, vocal-like trumpet tone, Cohen plays with the focused intensity of an opera singer; soaring with anger on the opening piece, before collapsing into sorrowful moans and coos as the suite progresses. Interestingly, he also plays flute here, his delicate tone adding a dreamlike sweetness that contrasts with the more turbulent passages. There's a painterly impressionism to Cohen's work, evoking both the modal style of Miles Davis and the classical modernism of composers like Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg. Underscoring the classical influences at play on the album is Cohen's latter-album reading of Maurice Ravel's "Adagio Assai" from the composer's "Concerto in G Major." Here, he strikes a virtuosic creative balance, reverently playing the melody, while also improvising upon it, his warm trumpet tumbling against Yonathan's angular piano lines. Finally, he ends the album with "The Seventh," a folk-like lullaby composed by his teenage daughter that feels like a hushed sigh, both sad and hopeful; a perfect encapsulation of the emotional journey Cohen takes you on with Ashes to Gold.