Since his emergence in Chick Corea’s trio in 1997, the Israeli-born double bassist Avishai Cohen has develop into a worldwide star for his bass sound that joins cello-like purity to percussive drama, and for authentic compositions embracing American jazz, Latin music, Sephardic-Jewish people tune, avant-funk, orchestral works, even pop-tinged vocals.
Cohen’s 2021 album Two Roses was a sympathetic jazz/classical collaboration with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, whereas 2019’s Arvoles was the alternative: a sublime chamber-musical enlargement of the intimacies of a jazz piano trio. However Shifting Sands is one thing exhilaratingly totally different – starker, less complicated, coming straight from the chief’s palpable enjoyment of jamming with energetic kindred spirits after the isolations of the pandemic.
The pianist is Elchin Shirinov, the considerate however forceful Azerbaijani musician who performed on each Two Roses and Arvoles, and the wild card is Roni Kaspi, the rising 21-year-old Israeli drumming sensation. Cohen’s characteristically songlike themes abound: Intertwined’s churning eight-note piano hook beneath the folksy bass-led melody is badgered by Kaspi’s snappy, cross-grooving interjections; or within the brightly dancing The Window, Shirinov’s upturning elisions on resolving figures sound just like the phrasing of a singer. The hymnal Dvash develops on a sublime piano/bass counterpoint (fitfully recalling the legendary Fashionable Jazz Quartet’s traditional dialogues) however irrepressibly disrupted by Kaspi’s asymmetrical patterns, whereas the unison bowed-bass-and-piano whirl of Pleasure is a car for her ferociously flat-out solo thrash towards the rapidly arriving hook. Cohen’s vivacious bass improv and Shirinov’s contrastingly imperturbable lyricism glow by way of this nice set – and if the brand new tunes add few surprises to the chief’s signature songbook, the taking part in is incandescent.
Additionally out this month
Snarky Pet keyboardist and acclaimed composer Invoice Laurance releases Invoice Laurance & the Untold Orchestra Reside at EFG London Jazz Pageant 2021 (Flint Music). It’s a collaboration with Manchester’s modern jazz/classical group the Untold Orchestra, that includes cinematically jazzy earworms together with Flint, December in New York, and the warmly dreamy Zeal.
Ethiopia-raised and LA-based keys authentic Kibrom Birhane joins driving funk, slinky Coltranesque sax traces wriggling by way of soul-bluesy horn vamps, and morphed Ethiopian song-structures on the improv-light however distinctively seductive Right here and There (Flying Carpet).
And LA producer/saxophonist Sam Gendel, whose ambient, digital, breathily sidelong sounds are mild years from common jazz, or known-world sax approach for that matter, unfolds extra eerily mesmeric solos and collaborations from the studios and streets on the 34-track Superstore (Leaving Information).
Post a Comment