At the Jazz’n’Klezmer festival, Avishai Cohen and Itamar Borochov, two velvet trumpets

2023-11-10 19:00:09
Trumpeter Avishai Cohen. ZIV RAVITZ

Two trumpets on the program for the 21st edition of the Jazz’n’Klezmer festival, but not those whose fury shook the walls of Jericho. They are run by two Israeli jazzmen with comparable itineraries, born in Tel Aviv among siblings of future musicians and migrated to New York, Avishai Cohen and Itamar Borochov. Recently authors of notable albums, respectively Naked Truth (ECM, 2022) and Or (Greenleaf Music), released in September. Two velvet phrasings in a world of brutes, each of which unfolds in quartets.

Regularly the victim of misunderstandings with his famous double bassist namesake, Avishai Cohen, 45, had nevertheless made things clear in 2003 by humorously titling his first album The Trumpet Player. Trained at the Jaffa Conservatory, in his youth a member of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, since 2016 he has become a pillar of the prestigious Munich house ECM (Edition of Contemporary Music), produced in person by one of the founders, double bassist Manfred Eicher. Previously, he also formed the ensemble 3 Cohens, with his sister Anat (clarinet, tenor and soprano saxophones) and his brother Yuval (alto and soprano saxophones).

“Path of silence”

With Naked Truth, a twelfth opus recorded, like the previous ones, at La Buissonne studios in Pernes-les-Fontaines (Vaucluse), the heir of Miles Davis took the “path of silence” in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. In eight parts closed by Departure, which suggests the heartbreaking words of Israeli poet Zelda Schneersohn Mishkovsky (“It is necessary to begin to leave the splendor of the heavens and the colors of the earth, to be alone and to face the silence of death”), this suite resonates with an unreal beauty to the point of metaphysical dizziness, irradiated by the free and overflowing playing of pianist Yonathan Avishai. The main inspiration came from Hariprasad Chaurasia, Indian master of the bansuri flute – made of bamboo and transverse –, which the Beatles, among others, introduced to Western audiences.

Le trompettiste Itamar Borochov, en 2023. RONEN GOLDMAN

The disc is entirely focused on interiority when that of Itamar Borochov, 39, remembers the Arab neighborhood frequented in Jaffa, like the Sephardic music discovered at the local synagogue. The trumpeter returned to Tel Aviv’s Old City during lockdown for this fourth album as leader – or means “four” in Hebrew –, the first for the label of his American colleague Dave Douglas, Greenleaf Music. The prototype instrument used allows him to integrate into his playing the microtonality of maqams, the interval systems which govern oriental music and also adorn his wordless singing. An oud solo, played by his double bassist brother Avri, concludes Ya Sahbi. A musician with a well-established syncretism between jazz and traditions of the Levant, Itamar Borochov was already pushing the boundaries in the 2010s when he joined Yemen Blues, a project by Israeli singer and composer of Yemeni origin Ravid Kahalani crossing funk, rock, sounds from the Sahel as well as the Gulf of Aden.

You have 5% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.