By Michael Ullman

The music on Avishai Cohen’s album, written and recorded soon after Oct 7, expresses a persistent hopeful gentleness.

Avishai Cohen, Ashes to Gold (ECM) w/ Yonathan Avishai, piano; Barak Mori, bass; Ziv Ravitz, drums.

In his 1951 book The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, poet Wallace Stevens argues that the creative imagination is necessary because it pushes back against the pressures of reality. Art changes when those pressures change. That sentiment could be an apt commentary on Tel Aviv trumpet player Avishai Cohen’s new quartet record Ashes to Gold, which contains a five-part eponymous suite that was composed under extraordinary pressures. One can almost feel the artist pushing back against the war that raged around him. The ECM disc has two extras: Cohen’s version of the mostly serene “Adagio assai” from Maurice Ravel’s Concerto in G major, and the final piece, “The Seventh.” “The Seventh” refers, of course, to the beginning of the Israeli-Hamas war on October 7, 2023. It was written by Cohen’s daughter, Amalia.

Cohen talks about the genesis of the “Ashes to Gold” suite in his notes. He had planned a month in Israel, where he would compose. The quartet would perform the music as it came out. The plan sounds relaxing. Then the bombs started flying. Cohen immediately stopped playing music altogether. He explains, “I could not write anything. I couldn’t touch the trumpet. In the beginning of November, I told Yonathan (his pianist) that I was going to have to cancel the tour and the recording, but he said ‘No. We need to go and play music.’ The way he said it was powerful. I knew he was right.” Cohen wrote much of the suite, he says, in a week. A wild week. “By this point [we were] in the full craziness of wartime. With rockets flying over my head, alarms and sirens going off, and so on. Did all of this affect the music? How could it not?”

Yet the resulting music is not filled with explosive moments and shudders. Even the composition’s title is expressive of a persistent hopeful gentleness. The title comes, Cohen tells us, from Japanese art of ceramic repair work known as kintsugi, “where you take the old and the broken and try and put the pieces back together to make something golden and beautiful from the fragments.” Cohen’s musical repair work was carefully planned. On earlier sessions, some of which were on ECM, Cohen presented the band with the music at the studio and let them improvise. Recorded in November 2023, Ashes to Gold was different: “We then had about a week to work on it, in a much more detailed way than previously. I was never as specific about what I wanted to hear on an album as this time. Every drum beat, every rhythmic emphasis, every crescendo was discussed and defined. How the notes should be played and placed and phrased, exactly what each of us would be doing in each section.”

The suite begins with a lyrical surprise. Trumpeter Cohen states the fetching melody of Pt. 1 on flute, at first solely accompanied by the piano. The sound is soon enriched by bowed bass. The musings of the quartet gradually intensify until they are interrupted at around two minutes, when pianist Avishai supplies swirling tremolos and sweeping passages behind Cohen’s trumpet. Drummer Ravitz introduces himself with a striking cymbal crash. A minute later the musicians go out of tempo and the mood turns menacing. While the pianist repeats an ominous tick-tock of two chords, Cohen pushes in with something of a threatening fanfare, drummer Ravitz hitting his crash cymbal repeatedly. Eventually, Ravitz plays something like military figures on snare and bass drum. Underlying the lyricism, the music seems to tell us, simmers tension, best conveyed by a long glissando on trumpet that sounds like a shriek. Yet there is always a return, if not to equanimity, than to relative calm. Pt. 2 is introduced by bowed bass. Ravitz comes in to repeat a two beat figure on bass drum, a bullying attempt to elbow the relative composure of Cohen’s trumpet solo aside. Pt. 3 is notable for bassist Mori’s solo and Pt. 4 by the pianist’s unaccompanied solo. He is ultimately joined by Cohen on flute again.

Israel trumpeter Avishai Cohen — offering “a requiem for a troubled world.” Photo: Daniella Feijoo

To this listener, the most intriguing composition on the album is Cohen’s version of the slow movement from Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major. Cohen says that he listened to the Martha Argerich recording obsessively while he was formulating this project. I’d recommend listeners do the same. (Conducted by Claudio Abbado, it’s available on an album as well as in a box, Argerich/Abbado’s Complete Concerto Recordings, and on the two-disc set Great Pianists of the Century, which is dedicated to Argerich.) Ravel’s “Adagio assai” opens with a soberly lyrical statement of the theme by the solo piano at a slow tempo. The subtlety of Argerich’s dynamics highlights the increasing, though restrained, intensity of the solo. The piano makes way for a flute solo and then the rest of the orchestra. It is Ravel’s spare use of the orchestra — and the relative passivity of the piano part — that makes this “Adagio assai” readily available for Cohen’s musings. Like his model, he opens his solo with a pleasingly broad, rich tone and with minimal vibrato. The trumpeter is soon joined by his bassist. When the piano and drums enter, it’s like a sunburst. The solemn intensity of the opening gives way to something we might call hopeful. The agitated passages return but, by the end, peace reigns. For Cohen, the hope he found in those tragic days came from within — he imposed it on his world.

For over 30 years, Michael Ullman has written a bimonthly jazz column for Fanfare Magazine, for which he also reviews classical music. He has emeritus status at Tufts University, where for 45 years he taught in the English and Music Departments, specializing in modernist writers and nonfiction writing in English, and jazz and blues history in music. He studied classical clarinet. The author or co-author of two books on jazz, he has written on jazz and classical music for the Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, High Fidelity, Stereophile, Boston Phoenix, Boston Globe, and other venues. He plays piano badly.