Avishai Cohen (Trumpet) - Ashes To Gold - Import CD

Credits:

Avishai Cohen (Trumpet)

Description:

This is the first new album in two years from Avishai Cohen, a leading trumpeter from Tel Aviv, Israel. The first moments of Ashes to Gold, a dramatic five-part suite that opens with the unfamiliar sound of this great Tel Aviv trumpeter playing flute, immediately tear apart the dreamy, almost pastoral atmosphere. What follows is some of the most intense and focused music Cohen and his band have ever recorded, reflecting the deep tensions of a troubled time. The imagery of the album title is taken from the ancient Japanese art of kintsugi. In a way, I think that's where we find ourselves. Our reality. This music cannot help but reflect the times, but in my hopeful imagination, there is also hope. At least, it's not just gloomy." Last fall, Cohen took a month's vacation in Israel, writing songs for a new album and intending to perform them at a concert on his way to a recording session in the south of France. But the catastrophe of October 7 brought his songwriting plans to an abrupt halt, he said. 'I couldn't write anything,' he said.At the beginning of November, I told Yonatan [pianist Yonatan Avishai] that I had to cancel the tour and the recording. But he said, 'No, we need to go play music. The way he said it was powerful. I thought he was right. The bulk of the film's suite was ultimately drafted in a compressed one-week period. With rockets flying overhead and alarms and sirens blaring. Did all this affect the music? How could they not? Hence, the suite expresses a wide range of emotions, from rage to alarm to deep melancholy, and draws from each of these expressive realms in a moving performance. Throughout the tour, Cohen added sections to the piece and used soundchecks to rehearse it. After rehearsals in Romania, it was discovered that a theme was missing." After the rehearsals in Romania, I realized I was missing a theme. A local promoter found me a studio with a small casio and I wrote the songs in it."This is the third part of the suite, and Avishai's gentle, lyrical lines float above the stately meditations of contrabass and piano. [Personnel] Avishai Cohen (tp flgh,fl) Yonathan Avishai (p) Barak Mori (b) Ziv Ravitz (ds)