Avishai Cohen (Trumpet)

“Big Vicious”

(ECM Records ECM 2680 – Bar Code 083 6025)

Avishai Cohen – trumpet, effects, synthesiser, Uzi Ramirez – guitar, Yonatan Albalak – guitar, bass
Aviv Cohen – drums, Ziv Ravitz – drums, live sampling

Having recently embarrassed my self by confusing two British drummers who share the name, Matt Brown,  I’m determined not to make the same mistake with the two Avishai Cohens.

The bass playing Avishai Cohen has featured on the Jazzmann web pages before, notably in my review of a stunning performance by his trio at the 2018 EFG London Jazz Festival.

Here we have his trumpet playing namesake, the younger of the two by eight years. Although unrelated both Cohens were born in Israel and each spent several years living in New York, firmly establishing themselves on the international jazz scene, before eventually returning to Israel.

Born into a musical family the trumpeter Avishai Cohen studied at the famous Berklee College of Music in Boston before moving to New York.  This latest release represents his eleventh album as a leader or co-leader, and his fourth for ECM following his début for the label in 2016.

Cohen has also recorded frequently with the band Third World Love and with the 3 Cohens, his group with his siblings Anat Cohen (clarinet, saxophone) and Yuval Cohen (saxophone). He has also enjoyed close musical alliances with bassist Omer Avital and keyboard player Jason Lindner in addition to numerous other sideman appearances. He also has strong links to the San Francisco based SF Jazz Collective.

Strongly influenced by Miles Davis the trumpeter first appeared on ECM in 2014 when he appeared as part of saxophonist Mark Turner’s quartet on the “Lathe of Heaven” album.

Having impressed producer and ECM label owner Manfred Eicher Cohen made his leadership début for the imprint the following year with “Into The Silence”, recorded with a quintet featuring pianist Yonathan Avishai, saxophonist Bill McHenry, bassist Eric Revis and drummer Nasheet Waits.

He followed this in 2017 with “Cross My Palm With Silver”, a quartet offering featuring Avishai, Waits and bassist Barak Mori.

Cohen has enjoyed a particularly long and fruitful association with pianist Avishai. The pair first played jazz together as teenagers in Tel Aviv and in 2019 they released the intimate duo set “Playing The Room”, also on ECM.

Cohen’s intelligent and lyrical music has proved to be an ideal fit for the ECM aesthetic and his albums for the label have garnered a good deal of critical acclaim.

With “Big Vicious” Cohen introduces a harder edged sound that draws on many influences, including rock, hip hop and electronica. A band name as well as an album title Big Vicious was formed six years ago when Cohen moved back to Israel and features an aggregation of old friends. Cohen and guitarist Uzi Ramirez were school mates in Tel Aviv,  guitarist/bassist Yonatan Albalak and drummer Aviv Cohen both hail from Jerusalem and have worked in several bands together.
This was the initial core of Big Vicious, with second drummer Ziv Ravitz later added to the line up. Ravitz had preciously been part of Cohen’s acoustic quartet and was charged with bringing something of the spirit of that unit to the electric ensemble that is Big Vicious.

“We’re all coming from jazz, but some of us left it earlier”, Cohen explains, “everyone’s bringing in their backgrounds, and that becomes part of the sound of the band.”

“Big Vicious” is a more collaborative project than Cohen’s previous recordings, with the other members of the band involved in the compositional process. Although the album was recorded by Eicher at Studios La Buissone in Southern France the initial writing sessions and rehearsals took place in the Tel Aviv studios of Israeli producer Yuvi Havkin, also known as Rejoicer, who became involved in the writing and receives a co-credit on three of the eleven tracks.

The group also recorded and analysed their live performances in an attempt to hone their approach, a method more commonly adopted by pop and rock musicians than jazz acts. Cohen describes the process as;  “Like analysing soccer games every night. It was great, fine tuning the music, zooming in on the pieces, finding little details to improve”.

That said Eicher still encouraged collective improvisation as part of the recording process. Like so many other ECM artists Cohen is quick to praise Eicher’s creative contribution stating;
We may have worked on the music for months, but finally the vibe on the album is our vibe on those three days of recording. It still feels like jazz in that way. We have a mutual trust. He trusts me that I’m bringing in the right thing, and I trust that he is with us in the concept, and the only question is: what makes the music resonate?”

Albalak adds;
 “Manfred’s contribution changed a lot. He’d say something and it could change the essence of a piece we’d been playing for two years, and we’d get to explore a new taste of it.”

Credited to Big Vicious and Rejoicer the opening track “Honey Fountain” establishes the group’s electro-acoustic template with its song-like structure, hip hop inspired grooves and richly textured guitar soundscapes. Emerging from a sonar like pulse akin to Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” the piece gradually gathers momentum with the leader’s trumpet floating above the rich bed of rhythms and textures, evoking a Portishead like sense of melancholy, but also achieving something of an anthemic quality.

Cohen’s solo composition “Hidden Chamber” continues the mood with the leader’s trumpet, sounding distinctly Miles like, once more soaring above a densely sculpted soundscape featuring guitar and synth texturing and the rhythmic interplay of the twin drum kits. At the close sampled voices are heard in a brief conversation regarding an “indefinable mysterious power”.

The rock side of the band’s music is thrown into sharp relief at the beginning of Cohen’s “King Kutner”, which is fuelled by Albalak’s propulsive electric bass groove and the sturdy thwack of the twin drum kits. Ramirez conjures up an evocative guitar twang and is briefly featured as a soloist. Meanwhile Cohen doubles up on trumpet and analogue synth. But just when you think you’ve got a handle on the piece it breaks down into a more abstracted, improvisatory passage, possibly the result of Eicher’s influence. This only serves to emphasise the power of the main theme, which eventually returns with added impetus. Immediately accessible, and undeniably powerful, this represents one of the album’s stand out tracks.

Big Vicious have always specialised in inspired cover versions and this album includes a stunning group arrangement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”, featuring Cohen’s melancholic playing of the familiar melody, ensconced with a shadowy framework of spidery guitars and subtly nuanced drumming, including some adept cymbal work, presumably by Ravitz. It’s a highly effective treatment of a very well known work, originally written as a solo piano piece. Listeners of a certain age may recall an extract from “Moonlight Sonata” being incorporated into “Half Moon Bay”, the rambling eleven minute epic on Mott The Hoople’s eponymous début from 1969.

Rejoicer adds his input to the group composed “Fractals”, the Indian scale that underpins the piece having been brought to the band by him. This anchor allows the group to improvise in spacey, trippy fashion on one of the album’s more ambient and abstract pieces.

The album’s second cover version is an arrangement of the Massive Attack song “Teardrop”, at nearly seven and a half minutes in duration the longest track on the album, and arguably its centrepiece. “Teardrop” has proved to be a popular vehicle for jazz musicians, I recall another excellent arrangement of the song by British pianist Robert Mitchell who featured it with his 3io featuring bassist Tom Mason and drummer Richard Spaven on the album “The Greater Good” back in 2008.  Something of a feature for Mason 3io’s version featured the bassist playing the memorable melody both with and without the bow.

The Big Vicious take on “Teardrop” features Cohen’s trumpet playing the melody line, effectively taking on the role of a lead vocalist. The backing supplied by the other musicians remains true to the ‘trip-hop’ spirit of the original with deep bass and drum grooves and layers of dubby, glitchy electronica. The members of Big Vicious grew up in the 90s and their choices for cover versions have frequently been drawn from this era. “’Teardrop’ is one we never get tired of” they explain, “It’s a piece you can stay in forever – every element in it is so complete and at the same time so simple.”

Cohen himself adds;  “In this band, it’s not really about the solos. That’s not the goal or aesthetic here. It’s really about how to make a song, even though no one sings. That’s the difference, to me, to my other work.”

The trumpeter’s own “The Things You Tell Me” further illustrates his point, with its song like structure centred around a gently circling guitar motif, subtly detailed jazz drumming and the composer’s own plaintive trumpet melodies.

The group composition “This Time It’s Different” ups the energy levels once more with the twin drums driving the tune, allied to Albalak’s subtly funky bass lines. Cohen blows pretty trumpet melodies and doubles on synth, and combines with Ramirez on guitar to help cement the club/disco style ambience.
It’s a joyous, if somewhat slight, piece that reminds me of some of drummer Manu Katche’s output for ECM.

“Teno Neno” is another compositional collaboration between Big Vicious and Rejoicer. It’s a beguiling piece featuring snatches of wispy melody, atmospheric sound-washes and an increasingly assertive groove that periodically threatens to pierce the air of atmospheric melancholy that surrounds the piece, at one point breaking through as the drummers seize temporary control.

The group composition “The Cow & The Calf” is another example of an “instrumental song”, both in terms of structure and atmosphere. It’s cut from the same cloth as “Teardrop” with the burnished sound of Cohen’s trumpet augmented by a winning combination of evocative electronica and powerful grooves.

The album concludes with Cohen’s “Intent”, an atmospheric lament featuring the pure but melancholic sound of his trumpet and the understated backing of heavily reverbed guitars, wispy synths and economical drum grooves. Again there’s a song like construction, with the final moments taking on an anthemic quality.

As an album “Big Vicious” is an intriguing beast, occupying a very personal territory part way between jazz and rock and embracing a variety of other musical styles in between. Electric era Miles Davis is an obvious comparison, from “In A Silent Way” to 80s pop cover versions such as his takes on Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” and Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time”. The dark, slightly melancholic feeling that pervades most of the record also reminds me of the music of fellow trumpeter ECM label mate, the late, great Tomasz Stanko.

In truth more parallels have been drawn between the music of Big Vicious and rock artists, with other commentators citing acts as diverse as Pink Floyd, Roxy Music, Robert Wyatt, The Pixies and Radiohead, as well as the more obvious Poritshead and Massive Attack. Big Vicious don’t really sound like the majority of these and Cohen’s playing in particular still roots their sound firmly in jazz. A more appropriate comparison has been with the soundtracks of David Lynch movies, the overall mood and the sound of Ramirez’s guitar in particular, makes this a totally apposite reference point.

On the whole I rather enjoyed the music of Big Vicious. Cohen’s own playing is superb throughout, highly fluent and technically flawless, but it’s very much his album. His sidemen play well, but on the whole remain rather anonymous, the ensemble sound, with the focus on the leader, remaining the priority throughout.

Emotionally and stylistically there’s not quite enough variation, although the album does have some stand-out moments, among them “King Kutner” and, of course, “Teardrop”.

These reservations aside there’s a great deal to enjoy here and one suspects that this may be one of those albums that reveals fresh secrets on each subsequent listening. I’d also wager that after spending so much time together that this tightly honed band would be a thrilling live prospect too, probably more obviously dynamic than they are on disc. Let’s hope that they get to prove this point to UK audiences at some point in the future.

 

 

 

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