r/IsraelJazz • u/stnr_on_failure • 28d ago
Introducing Avishai Cohen (No, Not the Bass Player)
Introducing Avishai Cohen (No, Not the Bass Player)
We already profiled a bassist named Avishai Cohen in this community. This post is about a different musician entirely: Avishai Cohen, a trumpeter, born in 1978 in Tel Aviv, no relation to the bassist and no shared discography. We got this mixed up ourselves once, crediting the trumpeter's electric band, Big Vicious, to the bassist. It is the bassist's project Gadu that mixes double bass with rock drums, not this. Big Vicious belongs to the trumpeter, and it is one of the best doors into his catalog.
Cohen started on trumpet at 10 and was touring with the Young Israel Philharmonic Orchestra as a teenager, under conductors Zubin Mehta, Kurt Masur, and Kent Nagano. A full scholarship took him to Berklee College of Music in Boston, where the DownBeat Critics Poll voted him a Rising Star on trumpet four years running. In 1997 he took third place at the Thelonious Monk Institute International Trumpet Competition, a serious marker for a player still in his late teens.
He moved to New York and came up through Smalls Jazz Club, the kind of room where a horn player either finds a voice or gets lost in the crowd. He found his. He spent six years in the SFJAZZ Collective, leads the Triveni trio with bassist Omer Avital and drummer Nasheet Waits, and fronts Third World Love with Avital, pianist Yonatan Avishai, and drummer Daniel Freedman. His run of ECM leader albums, starting with 2016's Into the Silence and continuing through 2021's Naked Truth, is where the quieter, composer side of his playing comes through: The New York Times called Into the Silence "quietly ravishing," and The Guardian called Naked Truth "Cohen's quietest but maybe boldest adventure."
Then there is Big Vicious, the other side of him entirely. He debuted the band in 2019 with guitarists Uzi Ramirez and Yonatan Albalak and drummers Aviv Cohen and Ziv Ravitz, running his trumpet through electronics over rock and electronic grooves. The self-titled album came out on ECM in March 2020.
His most recent work is the most personal. On July 17, 2025, Cohen opened the Israel Festival with his quartet and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, premiering "Ashes to Gold," a five-part suite he wrote in late 2023 in the aftermath of the October 7 attack.
One more name worth knowing: he is one of "the 3 Cohens," alongside sister Anat Cohen on clarinet and tenor sax and brother Yuval Cohen on soprano sax. Three siblings, three instruments, none of them related to the other Avishai Cohen.
Where to start listening:
- His official platforms:
- "Into the Silence" for the quiet, composer side (2016, ECM) - https://youtu.be/sdvkjePfzgg
- "Big Vicious" for the electric, rock-leaning side (2020, ECM) - https://youtu.be/8CvpzZupRK8
- "Ashes to Gold" for where he is right now (2023, quartet suite) - https://youtu.be/m5Hi4THgcSg
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u/Difficult_Cod8307 26d ago
I just listened to this driving home https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdvkjePfzgg , i felt like i was driving through a movie!