Avishai Cohen US tour - DL Media Music

Trumpeter Avishai Cohen Announces March US Tour in Support of His New ECM Album, Ashes to Gold

Cohen, Who Hasn’t Toured the US in Five Years, Performs in

San Francisco, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Denver, Evanston and More

Ashes to Gold Mirrors the Deep Tensions of a Troubled Era, and is Some of the Most Intense and Concentrated Music Cohen has Recorded to Date

Album and Tour Features Pianist Yonathan Avishai,

Bassist Barak Mori, and Drummer Ziv Ravitz

Available Now via ECM

“Quietly stunning in that distinctive Cohen manner, [Ashes to Gold] may well be the leader’s masterpiece.” — The Big Takeover

“Avishai Cohen has rather quietly become one of the most creative trumpet players in jazz.” — JazzTimes

Trumpeter Avishai Cohen, who hasn’t toured the US in five years, performs at select cities in support of new album Ashes to Gold, which was released in October on ECM. Joining Cohen on tour are the same musicians who perform on the album, including pianist Yonathan Avishai, bassist Barak Mori and drummer Ziv Ravitz.

The first moments of “Ashes to Gold” – the dramatic five-part suite which opens Avishai Cohen’s new album – feature the unfamiliar sound of the great Tel Aviv trumpeter playing flute, establishing a dreamlike, almost pastoral ambience soon to be torn apart. What follows is some of the most intense and concentrated music Cohen and his band of friends have recorded to date, mirroring the deep tensions of a troubled era.

Ashes to Gold: the title imagery is drawn from the old Japanese art of kintsugi, the ceramic repair work “where you take the old and the broken and try and put the pieces back together, to make something golden and beautiful from the fragments,” says Cohen. “In a way I think that’s where we dwell. Our reality. And although this music can’t help but reflect the times, it also – in my wishful imagination – has some hope to it. At least, it is not only dark.”

Last autumn, Cohen had intended to take a month off in Israel to write the music for his new album, and to play the pieces at concerts en route to the recording session in the South of France. The cataclysmic events of October 7, however, brought composing plans to an abrupt halt:

“I could not write anything. I couldn’t touch the trumpet. In the beginning of November, I told [pianist] Yonathan [Avishai] that I was going to have to cancel the tour and the recording, but he said ‘No. We need to go and play music’. The way he said it was powerful. I knew he was right.”

Most of the “Ashes to Gold” suite was ultimately drafted in the compressed time period of a week, “by this point in the full craziness of wartime. With rockets flying over my head, alarms and sirens going off, and so on. Did all of this affect the music? How could it not?” Accordingly, the suite runs the gamut of emotions, from enraged to wary to profoundly melancholic, and draws forth moving performances in each of its expressive registers. On tour, Cohen was still adding sections to the music and using sound-checks to rehearse them. “After a rehearsal in Romania, I knew I was missing a theme. I had the timbre and the sound of it in my mind but I still had to write it. The local promoter found me a studio that had a small Casio in it, and I wrote the music on that.” This became Part III of the suite, where Cohen’s tenderly lyrical line floats above the grave meditation of double bass and piano.

The input of the group that includes pianist Yonathan Avishai, bassist Barak Mori and drummer Ziv Ravitz, all gifted players long attuned to Cohen’s sound world, was different than on Cohen’s earlier ECM recordings, Into The Silence, Cross My Palm With Silver, and Naked Truth. “Generally, in the past the band didn’t see the music until the studio. And my attitude was often ‘Well, this is what I’ve written, so do what you do: give me your improvisational interpretation’. But this time Yonathan and Barak got to look at some of the music before we left Israel and we then had about a week to work on it, in a much more detailed way than previously. I was never as specific about what I wanted to hear on an album as this time. Every drum beat, every rhythmic emphasis, every crescendo was discussed and defined. How the notes should be played and placed and phrased, exactly what each of us would be doing in each section…”

About Avishai Cohen

Avishai Cohen is globally recognized as 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. Aside from the acclaimed work with his quartet over the last several years, and previously his trio work under the moniker Triveni, the trumpeter has also recorded and toured the world as part of the Mark Turner Quartet, the SFJAZZ Collective, Jazz100, Zakir Hussain, and the 3 Cohens Sextet – with his sister, clarinetist-saxophonist Anat, and brother, saxophonist Yuval. Named as the Artistic Director of the International Jerusalem Festival, Cohen has also been voted a Rising Star on three consecutive occasions in the DownBeat Critics Poll.

2025 TOUR DATES

MAR 16 SUN: SFJAZZ Center @ 7:00 PM, San Francisco, CA

MAR 18 TUE: Pico Union Project @ 8:00 PM, Los Angeles, CA

MAR 19 WED: Jazz at the Athenaeum @ 7:30 PM, San Diego, CA

MAR 21 FRI: Outpost Performance Space @ 7:30 PM, Albuquerque, NM

MAR 22 SAT: Dazzle Denver @ 7:00 PM & 9:30PM, Denver, CO

MAR 25 TUE: Space @ 7:30 PM, Evanston, IL

MAR 26 WED: Capital University @ 7:00 PM, Columbus, OH

MAR 27 THU: Swyer Theatre at the Egg @ 7:30 PM, Albany, NY

MAR 28 FRI: Regattabar @ 7:30 PM, Cambridge, MA

MAR 29 SAT: National Sawdust @ 7:00 PM, Brooklyn, NY