Avishai Cohen, "Ashes to Gold", ECM, 2025
By Jeff Cebulski | ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Avishai Cohen: trumpet
Yonathan Avisha: piano
Barak Mori: bass
Ziv Ravitz: drums
The trumpeter and band leader Avishai Cohen was challenged in every creative way by the tragic events in Israel that began on October 7, 2023: “I could not write anything. I couldn’t touch the trumpet.” Convinced by his pianist Yonathan Avishai that they needed to play music, Cohen, newly motivated, composed the bulk of his suite Ashes to Gold in a week’s time, adding sections to it during a subsequent tour.
What emerged was a composition unlike what Cohen and his quartet—Avishai, Barak Mori (bass), and Ziv Ravitz (drums)—have done before in that the music is tightly produced and rehearsed with little to no room for improvisation. The title references the Japanese kintsugi ceramic repair art, which recreates a broken item from its fragments, using gold to attach them. In this case, Cohen and his ensemble are the ones fragmented and their music is the gold.
[Avishai Cohen and his quartet will be performing a WDCB-sponsored concert at SPACE in Evanston on Tuesday, March 25.]
The five-part suite has the elegiac tone of Cohen’s Into the Silence but with an implied dramatic intensity that makes the two added tracks—a Ravel work and a piece written by Cohen’s daughter Amalia—a refreshment, part of the “gold” Cohen was aiming for. The dramatic element is most intense in Part I, with Cohen playing flute in creating a pastoral atmosphere that would be ripped apart by violence. Avishai’s chiming passage (almost like funereal peals) leads to Ravitz’s pounding of drums that interrupts the peace. Mori bows a portentous line; Ravitz drums a military cadence; Cohen, back on trumpet, tells the anguished story. Eventually the flute returns, but with a droll and poignant bowed bass and that piano chime.
Parts 2 through 5 represent Cohen’s attempt to find meaning after the onslaught. The mood never approaches anger but contemplates loss. The trumpet wails and wonders while lingering battles, represented by Ravitz’s background pounding, remain. Mori plays a dignified elegy in front of Cohen’s most lyrical statement that honors the lost. A chamber interlude precedes Avisahi’s flowing intro to the final portion, suggesting that life goes on. Cohen plays an echoed passage that proclaims rather than laments, while Ravitz pulses, emphasizing movement over passivity.
At the end, Cohen’s Ashes to Gold rises above the fray, and, with Ravel’s Adagio assai and his daughter’s lovely “The Seventh” added, proposes that the dignity of music and a new generation can lift a moribund situation into a purposeful future while holding close a profound memory.
[This review is reprinted with permission of The New York City Jazz Record, nycjazzrecord.com.]
For more info, go to https://ecmrecords.com/product/ashes-to-gold-avishai-cohen-yonathan-avishai-barak-mori-ziv-ravitz/
For more concert info, go to https://evanstonspacemusic.com
About Jeff Cebulski
Jeff Cebulski, who lives in Chicago, is a retired English educator (both secondary and collegiate) and longtime jazz aficionado. His career in jazz includes radio programs at two stations in southeast Wisconsin, an online show on Kennesaw State’s (GA) Owl Radio from 2007 until 2015, and review/feature writing for Chicago Jazz Magazine since 2016, including his column "Jazz With Mr. C". He has interviewed many jazz artists, including Joshua Redman, Charles Lloyd, Dave Holland, John Beasley, and Chris Brubeck, as well as several Chicago-based players. Jeff is a member of the Jazz Journalists Association. Contact Jeff at jeff@chicagojazz.com