Avishai Cohen Into The Silence (2 LP)

180g Vinyl Double LP Reissue!
Avishai Cohen impressed a lot of listeners with his soulful contributions to Mark Turner’s Lathe of Heaven album in 2014. Now the charismatic Tel Aviv-born trumpeter has his ECM leader debut in a programme of expansive and impressionistic compositions for jazz quartet (trumpet, piano, bass, drums), augmented by tenor saxophone on a few pieces.
Into The Silence is dedicated to the memory of Avishai’s father David, reflecting upon the last days of his life with grace and restraint. Avishai’s tender muted trumpet sets the emotional tone of the music in the album’s opening moments and his gifted cast of musicians explore its implications. Israeli pianist Yonathan Avishai has played with Cohen in many settings and solos creatively inside the trumpeter’s haunting compositions, sometimes illuminating them with the phraseology of the blues.
Cohen and drummer Nasheet Waits have a hypersensitive understanding and their interaction can, from moment to moment, recall the heyday of Miles Davis and Tony Williams or Don Cherry and Billy Higgins. Yet this music, while acknowledging inspirational sources, is very much of our time. Bassist Eric Revis, a cornerstone of the Branford Marsalis quartet for two decades, provides elegant support throughout. And saxophonist Bill McHenry, a subtle modernist who has worked with Paul Motian and Andrew Cyrille, shadows Cohen’s lines with feeling. Into The Silence was recorded at Studios La Buissonne in the South of France in July 2015 and produced by Manfred Eicher.
"Cohen is a multicultural jazz musician, among whose ancestors is Miles Davis. Like Davis, he can make the trumpet a vehicle for uttering the most poignant human cries." — The New York Times
"‘Into the silence’ is trumpeter Avishai Cohen’s debut as leader for the ECM label, and what a breathtaking album it is. […] it is the honesty of Cohen’s music that shines through with a clarity and purity of sound that is stunningly beautiful. The trumpeter plays with a very personal, deeply moving tone that is not only touching and soulful, but also free-spirited and open. [] The whole album has a quiet sincerity to it, yet it’s not without a remarkable spirit, at times lyrical and hauntingly melodic. Cohen takes the lead on most of the tracks, and rightly so, playing with a freshness that is enlightening. I cannot think of many musicians that sound so passionate yet softly understated all in one breath. []there is an intimacy to the whole recording that the listener can almost reach out and touch. It hangs in the air, in the spaces between the notes, in the unspoken thoughts that pass between the performers, in the unwritten poetry that they are making through their music. It is something that can’t quite be defined, something that could so easily be lost if one tried to hold onto it for too long. Luckily for us the spirit of this musical journey is captured beautifully on this recording. A wonderful album." - Mike Gates, UK Vibe
"The CD – blue, according to blue, begins in a touchingly tender way, in a spirit akin to the melancholic side of Miles Davis. A lot of pastel, a lot of space, an infinite amount of feeling." - Ssirus W. Pakzad, Jazzthing
"The rhythm team is a marvelously restrained and supportive unit, McHenry playing sparingly and mainly as a supportive second line. The main voice has to be Cohen’s and his trumpet playing is direct, delicate in its phrasing, somehow both elegiac and celebratory at the same time. Every track, even the brief final reprise of ‘Life And Death’ which acts as an epilogue, feels like a rich and complete suite within a suite, the themes and moods waxing and waning, changing and returning along their length. A quietly bold and, I think, important album." - Peter Bacon, the Jazz Breakfast
"Everything seems intense and eloquently put to the point. The musical wholeness lives from the profound colleagues: pianist Yonathan Avishai and tenor saxophonist Bill McHenry are in a delicate exchange of ideas with Cohen – as well as bassist Eric Revis and drummer Nasheet Waits. The whole thing is 90 percent a lesson in how to keep internal tension at all times despite a decelerated basic attitude." - Ljubisa Tosic, The Standard
"Trumpeter Avishai Cohen shows on his terrific new album how to escape role models. It is not easy for a trumpeter with a penchant for melancholy like Avishai Cohen to escape the shadow of Miles Davis. You also get a first look at his new album 'Into The Silence'. Right at the beginning, he plays on the stuffed trumpet over pauses, with which the rhythm section sets almost stronger accents than with its minimalist accompaniment. This captivates from the first moment, because there is a familiarity [...] The melancholy here feeds not from the canon of cool, but from a moment of very private pain. Cohen wrote the plays in the period after the death of his father. How manically he listened to the piano music of Sergei Rachmaninov at that time. Cohen consistently reduced this force on the album. Restraint is the program. Piano, double bass and the extremely economical drums keep the tension throughout the album with the help of these strategic breaks." - Andrian Kreye, Süddeutsche Zeitung
"Trumpeter Avishai Cohen’s beautiful, elegiac ‘Into The Silence’ is a tribute to his late father, who died in 2014. Lesser life changes of a musical nature are also involved […] Cohen assembled a new quintet for the project, and the music is more composed and introspective – the title track, in particular, began as a piano figure that came to Cohen upon his father’s death […] But the five of them sound like they’ve been playing together forever." - Bill Beutler, Jazz Times (Editor’s Pick)
"The mournful sad tones of Avishai of the Cohens liken the leader to Miles Davis: muted, underscored with piano/bass/drums plus tenor sax, and filled with a longing that won't ever go away. […] Recorded in the south of France over a period of only three days, ‘Into The Silence’ does not depress the listener but rather instills into the ear a free-flowing amalgam of mellifluous positivism." - Mike Greenblatt, Classicalite
"The group members have an organic, focused intensity as if they hang on each phrase together. This intensity is well matched by Eicher's production, which sounds typically warm and full of natural reverb […] with Cohen leading his band through ambient soundscapes that, much like one's emotions after the death of a loved one, are supple and sad one minute, and sharp and tangled the next." - Matt Collar, Allmusic.com
"Cohen with his soulful, vocalized tonal nuances and inventively coherent phrasing, is given the space to stretch out through a series of six compositions in which the band’s patient development of Cohen’s thematic sketches capture an elevated, airy ebb-and-flow. […] a mesmerizing exchange of ideas." - Selwyn Harris, Jazzwise
"Accompanied by piano, saxophone, double bass and drums, Cohen intensifies into an intensity that is more familiar from e-culture. None of this seems boastful: the skill of the musicians and their enjoyment of the game hold the balance. A Miles Davis of the present – almost too cool to be true." - Tobias Schmitz, Stern
"The whole album could also be considered as a kind of study of the infinite expressive possibilities of the mute, of which Avishai Cohen plays with unparalleled sensitivity. However‘ 'Into The Silence' can be read more deeply as a meditation on absence." - Pascal Rozat, Jazz Magazine
"The remarkable thing about 'Into The Silence' is that Cohen's expressive and graceful trumpet playing is always present, but never superficial. Rather, he cultivates a kind of elegant restraint, in which he records a melancholic connection to the piano blue notes, the lyrical reflections of the saxophone and the subtle rhythm duo." - Olaf Maikopf, Jazz Aesthetics
"The music radiates with authority. Whether it’s an overt ballad like ‘Life And Death’ or the momentary agitation of the title cut, the program is bolstered by a deeply considered feel. […] a somber program that’s well calibrated, poetic and straight from the heart." - Jim Macnie, Downbeat
"One of the outstanding new releases of this spring. It is a work of simple themes that unfolds its fragile melancholy especially in the ensemble (with tenor saxophonist Bill McHenry as a guest). The solos and dialogues that result weigh no more than the splashes of color that everyone contributes in the group." - Gregor Dotzauer, Tagesspiegel
"The opener exudes a lot of the spirit of the legendary second Miles Davis quintet. Despite the weighty title 'Life And Death', this trumpet played with a damper floats as if through a weightless space. Everything hangs as if on thin silver threads, a song that comes out of nowhere rises like incense. [...] Cohen is a great musician who articulates more than just grief over a loss with this last greeting. His album 'Into The Silence' crosses complex emotional worlds." - Karl Lippegaus, Stereo
"‘Into the Silence’ is an extraordinary project on every level. There is a transcendence in this music that is both uplifting and heartbreaking. The group plays as one, they genuinely feel an appreciation of humanity and life-changing ramifications of loss. The rendering of these compositions is never over-sentimental, but never less than authentic. A masterpiece." - Karl Ackermann, All About Jazz
"Every modern trumpet player must come to terms with Miles Davis. Cohen speaks his own trumpet language with his own cultural inflections. But his sound, with or without a mute, brings back Davis’s mystery and melancholy in long trumpet calls like sighs of the soul. Cohen’s lines are instantly mutable because the emotions they portray are complex. Cohen the trumpet improviser alters and deepens the ideas of Cohen the composer […] Pianist Yonathan Avishai is entrusted to close the suite with a stunning, radiant, three-minute solo called ‘Life and Death-Epilogue’. It is a deep reflection on and summation of the album’s emotional journey. It acknowledges sorrow, but its passionate, slow ascent arrives at acceptance." - Thomas Conrad, Stereophile
"‘Into The Silence’ is a set of reflections on the death of Cohen’s father – often solemn but never dirgey, and beautifully recorded. The pieces join classically pure trumpet soliloquies, grainier trumpet-sax exchanges that recall Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter’s 60s dialogues, a mercurial rhythm section (Eric Revis and Nasheet Waits), and piano playing of shapely minimalism from Yonathan Avishai. Cohen’s muted trumpet wreathes over Waits’s quiet brushwork and rises with Bill McHenry’s tenor sax over arrhythmic rimshots; New York adrenalin segues into resolute melancholy, and piano ostinatos bring to mind early Abdullah Ibrahim hooks. The breadth of jazz references will make this irresistible for fans, but it’s beautiful contemporary music for just about anyone." - John Fordham, The Guardian (Five Stars)
"Trumpeter Avishai Cohen has steadily built his reputation through seven albums and successful collaborations as a sideman, but ‘Into The Silence’, his debut for ECM, touches a new creative plateau. A threnodic suite for his late father, the album is a somber and deeply felt reflection on the man’s life, expressed through episodic compositions that seem to wander with intention, as if the son were walking through the now-empty rooms of his father’s house, poring over objects and symbols [….] ‘Into the Silence’ is a beautiful listening experience, a fully satisfying artistic venture that more than meets the high expectations placed on it." - Tom Greenland, The New York City Jazz Record

• Double LP
• 180g Vinyl
• Gatefold jacket
• Made in Germany