Avishai Cohen is globally recognized as a one of the leading voices on trumpet and a musician with an individual sound and a questing spirit, an ever-creative player-composer open to multiple strains of jazz and active as a leader, co-leader and sideman.

It’s impossible not to hear the beauty of the music performed by the trumpeter Avishai Cohen and his Quartet of long-time (30 years !) close friends. With his open and warm tone and his narrated-energy and balance, his serene compositions sound more powerful and emotional than on the albums he has recorded for ECM the past decade. With the recent sneak-peak of his new album Ashes to Gold (release September 27, 2024 on ECM Records) in a sold out Vredenburg concert hall in The Netherlands, Cohen proved to be absolute in form, presenting his new and forthcoming Suite. It was of breathless beauty – recorded in November 2023, one month after the Israel-Gaza war started.

With unhidden emotion Cohen dedicated his new Suite to an immediate cease fire in which he added that music speaks louder than words. What followed was of special and rare expressiveness, which one does not find or hear easily in music these days. Starting out slowly on flute with a soft and warm theme, which with a turn of his trumpet changed into a stormy and dark passage filled with unrest, dark piano chords, heavy bass and hard drums. Impossible not to think about what is happening in the Middle-East as we speak. Gripping how Cohen plays with the pedals of his trumpet, accentuating despair, in conversation with his band, especially the narratives each band member tells. Cohen brought it all together.

The title of his new album is Ashes To Gold but the mere confidence, narrative power and emotion, made this concert a small miracle.

Opening the evening is singer, harpist, and choir conductor Sophye Soliveau. Nurtured on Afro-American music since childhood, she studied classical harp and choral singing at the Conservatoire. Since then, she has broken out of the narrow confines of classical education, moving into soul, jazz and gospel.