Avishai Cohen - Seeking the Big Rain
An Israeli to Manhattan transplant who has been acclaimed as “an assertive and accomplished trumpeter with a taste for modernism” (New York Times), Avishai Cohen is not your typical jazz musician.
As it was in the 40s, 50s and 60s, New York remains a musical melting pot that absorbs every style and sound and retranslates it as something new and fresh. A typical performance at the Jazz Gallery, an edgy Soho nightspot, might feature a saxophonist from Panama, a drummer from Cuba, perhaps an alto player from Santa Domingo. These transplants, from David Sanchez to Dafnis Prieto to Miguel Zenon, have revitalized and staked their claim to New York’s storied jazz language, and prodded it into the future. These musicians typically bring native fire to bear in their newfound jazz language. Often, blistering rhythms are part and parcel of the Jazz Gallery menu. But Avishai Cohen has taken a different direction with his latest release, Flood (Anzic Records).
A meditative, thoughtful and at times eerie exploration of some distant (we hope) earth meeting its demise, Flood, like Cohen’s previous release, After the Big Rain, is a suite-like album that ruminates on the power of water.
“It came from thinking a lot about moral questions and the way we live our lives in a modern society,” Cohen explains. “Thinking about how life is improved with technology, but really the feeling to me living here in New York is that everything is instant and fast and not personal. We email and text and no one knows how to be alone anymore. It’s this whole way of feeling that we are somehow living wrong. The idea of the flood came to me with the tsunami in Phuket and hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Maybe these are signs for another flood that is coming? It raises the question “Can we change society”? After recording After the Big Rain, I decided I wanted to do before the flood as well, a description of today.”
Part of Cohen’s planned The Big Rain Trilogy, Flood follows After the Big Rain, a hard charging release that seemingly channeled chaos and flight into a musical statement on environmental global collapse. Typically able to see the big picture regardless of setting, Cohen is part of an acclaimed musical family that includes clarinetist Anat Cohen and soprano saxophonist Yuval Cohen (together known as the 3 Cohens). Avishai also recently completed the three-CD soundtrack to Seven – “A Visual Journey of Light as a Symbol of Time,” conceived by visual artist Elinor Milchan and exhibiting as a multi-screen video installation in New York’s Times Square Building. And he will be joining the forward thinking SF Jazz Collective in the New Year. But today, Avishai’s thoughts run to global catastrophe as a kind of meditation.
“Flood is meditative because I have taken the less obvious path,” Cohen says. “Instead of something chaotic, I took the point of view of nature. For nature a flood doesn’t mean death and destruction and sorrow. It’s just another cycle and part of itself. It was very conceptualized. The album tells a story from the first drop through the flood until after the rain has stopped and the land fills with water with the sun and moon over it. The titles tell the story.”
Accompanied by percussionist Daniel Freedman and pianist Yonatan Avishai, Cohen’s Flood is sparse, elemental, and deceptively simple in scope. The titles, “First Drops,” “Heavy Water,” “Sunrays Over Water,” allude to calm amid what would be mass human confusion. Built around a two note phrase, the music seems to change little track to track, coursing a brooding path through emotionally evocative terrain. But Flood eventually powerfully culminates into a rumination on end times and man’s place -- or not -- in them.
“It was taken from an experience I had in the Sinai desert,” Cohen muses. “I was sitting there for three days, just looking at the water and the mountains, observing the cycles of how the sun goes up and disappears, the moon rises, then time became only about that. It was a special time. So this is from the view of nature. Nature doesn’t care about much, it is what it is. It doesn’t want or need anything; it’s just there, ever changing, but also just there. That is a super meditative feeling to me.”
The opening pic: Courtesy of Anzic Records.