Trumpeter Avishai Cohen’s Quest For Tranquility

News, From the Magazine, Avishai Cohen (trumpet)

By James Hale I May. 26, 2020

In his band Big Vicious, Avishai Cohen plays trumpet and synthesizers.
(Photo: Mark Sheldon)

Around six years ago, he launched Big Vicious, a singular quintet in which he plays trumpet and synthesizers alongside guitarist Uzi Ramirez, guitarist/bassist Yonatan Albalak and drummers Ziv Ravitz and Aviv Cohen (no relation). While the material is new, the band has roots that reach all the way back to the bandleader’s youth in Israel.

The eclectic guitarists are friends from his high school, while Aviv Cohen—who also works under the name Sol Monk—is a Jerusalem native the trumpeter worked with in New York. The concept for a funk-influenced unit with double instruments is something its leader explored as far back as 2007.

“I worked with this type of repertoire for a while in New York with various personnel,” Cohen said. “I had two drummers, two bass players. Meshell Ndegeocello played in it, Adam Deitch [from the band Lettuce] played drums, Mark Kelley from The Roots, Jason Lindner. My sister played with us, too. The repertoire for it just continued to grow.”

Tel Aviv’s multifaceted music scene—where electronica, pop and trip-hop co-exist and spark hybrid approaches—proved to be the ideal setting to reignite what had been a nameless entity during its New York period.

Resurrected shortly after Cohen initially left New York for Tel Aviv, Big Vicious was originally on his mind when he signed a contract with ECM Records in 2015.

“We planned on recording a few years ago,” Cohen recalled, “but it took awhile to find the right aesthetics and figure out how to play properly with the two drummers. It was a challenge and a quest. At the time, recording it with ECM didn’t seem like the right move, so I went with the quartet,” which recorded Into The Silence, his 2016 ECM debut.

Along with the material Cohen developed for the band during his time in New York, Big Vicious began to build arrangements and new tunes. The sound of the ensemble began to reflect the diverse experiences of its members, according to Cohen, but one element—the presence of two drummers—continued to bother him.

“Working with two drummers, I kept wondering, ‘How tight can we get it?’ In the past few years, especially when Ziv joined, it started to change. I wanted to strip it down, find the simplicity. It’s all about reduction and repetition.”

Every band that has attempted to combine two drummers—whether it be the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers Band or saxophonist Joe Lovano’s Us Five—has had to find the sweet spot where percussionists like the Allmans’ Butch Trucks and Jaimoe complemented each other’s styles and touch, and flowed as one, rather than bumping against one another and drowning each other out.

“I think the most commonly known concept for multiple percussion instrumentalists in a situation like this is to work out parts and responsibility within each song to prevent train wrecks,” Ravitz said. “But here, we wanted to find something else. We decide what the music needs and not what drum part is needed. We follow the idea of the song. We can change responsibility even within a phrase. For example, someone plays the main groove and the other colors around it, and midway through the song the other drummer can take over the main groove and we change parts. [Big Vicious producer and ECM Records head] Manfred Eicher described us many times as one big octopus. We listen to each other very deeply. We play less. We think of ourselves as one unit with the responsibility for the music and the freedom that comes from jazz.”

Even with the drummers locked in, though, Cohen had to get over one more obstacle before taking the band into the studio. “We did a mini-tour in May 2019, just before rehearsals were to start for the recording,” he said, “but I had just moved back to Tel Aviv, so my mind wasn’t on writing. I told the guys, ‘Look, I didn’t bring anything, and I don’t feel like spending four days just rehearsing old material.’”

So, the band spent four days writing new material and working up versions of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” and Massive Attack’s 1998 trip-hop hit “Teardrop.” Joining them was Tel Aviv-based Yuvi Havkin (aka Rejoicer), the influential producer, beat-maker and founder of the Raw Tapes label.

“The music was created with the mentality of pop music where the intention was our guideline followed by details of execution using the idiom itself,” Ravitz said. “The self expression comes with the nuances and freedom that comes from jazz, without the improvisation parts being so grandiose. It forces us to be selfless with the intention of pop musicians, the execution of classical music and the mentality and freedom of jazz.”

“We focused on what we wanted it to be and what we didn’t want,” Cohen said. “I said, ‘Let’s think about what we don’t like about music, and let’s make sure we don’t do that.’”

That attention to the moment continued last August when the band convened in the same studio where Cohen’s last quartet album—2017’s Cross My Palm With Silver—was recorded, in the south of France.

“We used our environment to help shape the session,” Cohen said. “Between tracks, we’d take a break and go outside. We were working in a beautiful setting; there was a beautiful breeze outside. I said to the guys, ‘Let’s inhale this feeling, feel the breeze on your skin. Let’s carry this into the next take.’”

Despite how easily the album came together in the studio, and how aware he’d been that Big Vicious represented a major departure from what he’s done before, particularly for ECM, Cohen said the results still held a significant surprise for him.

“It was only when I listened to the playback that I noticed I have almost no solos on this recording,” Cohen said. “It surprised me, but I didn’t mind it. I said, ‘We played the songs the way they needed to be played.’ That place where I normally solo, we just let the music sing, and played it the way it should be played.”

From beginning to end, then, the gestation and recording of Big Vicious’ debut seems to be the perfect culmination of Cohen’s attempt to live life in the moment.

For those who have accompanied the bandleader on this part of the journey and know him well, like Waits, it all makes perfect sense.

“Avishai was always looking for that inner peace, and trying to resonate that through his music,” Waits said. “He’s always conscious and aware of what’s happening, and trying to do the right thing. He’s on the search.” DB

This story originally was published in the June 2020 issue of DownBeat. Subscribe here.