This month: Avishai Cohen
Avishai Cohen has a rich and diverse cultural background, born in Israel into a family with roots in Spain, Greece and Poland. He began playing piano aged nine, later adding bass guitar when the family moved to St Louis, then discovering electric bass when he heard Jaco Pastorius. In 1992 he moved to New York, surviving by working in construction, busking and recording with Danilo Pérez, adding Latin music to his influences.
He would attract major attention when, in 1997, he was invited to join pianist Chick Corea’s trio, becoming a significant part of Corea’s groups for the next six years. ‘Chick listened to me before a lot of other people,’ he says. ‘He especially embraced my writing.’ Corea’s death in February was the loss of a good friend as well as an influential mentor and colleague. ‘His passing took me by surprise, much more than I would have expected. He was the greatest person I have ever met in terms of exchange on a musical level.’
Cohen’s latest album, Two Roses (reviewed in the May issue), involves the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. The music grew from ‘An Evening with Avishai Cohen’, a project initiated in 2016 that mixed orchestral pieces and sets by his improvising groups. He describes it as ‘two hours of an intense journey that reflects a lot of my genetic life, spiritually and culturally. It’s really the story of who I am, what I’m made of.’
Jazz is a genre characterised by spontaneity, difficult for large ensembles to achieve, and the price of their wider range of sonorities is less flexibility than a jazz group has, so what were the attractions and challenges of working with them? ‘I have felt that a lot of my music has the nature of movements, which could be orchestrated. The through-written parts get the orchestra to a state they don’t usually reach, with intricate rhythms they don’t usually deal with. We can’t get the agility we get with the trio and as jazz musicians, so it was sometimes difficult for me to accept the way the music was being played. It took a while to accept that it has a new life.’ Barry Witherden
‘Chick was the greatest person I have met in terms of exchange on a musical level’