Photo by Steve Nash







Concord Records

A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH AVISHAI COHEN


I have spoken with Avishai Cohen twice before, so this is a walk in the park for me. Plus, he is an informed and well spoken man. He was a young man then. He's not so young anymore, but he is as interesting as ever. I guess some things never change. Thank God. Here he is folks, Avishai Cohen, unedited and in his own words.


FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.

AVISHAI COHEN: It is an evolving thing that starts from a basic attraction to any kind of art, but music, to me, was just music. It started with listening to Beethoven played by sister or my mom playing a record and then the need to just be a part of music, making music as a kid, sitting on the piano and making sounds and making melodies and remembering them. That is the connection to music or just feeling a deep feeling when I heard a song. Then playing this music is an evolvement of years of being in a situation where improvised music is what I do is improvise and improvisation brought me to jazz and jazz brought me to do what I am doing, or part of what I am doing because at home, I do many things with music, not only that have to do with jazz.


FJ: Such as?

AVISHAI COHEN: Well, I write. I have done a record with my mother, which is myself accompanying her with piano. That is a Jewish music that is old tunes that has been around that was carried by the Jewish people from Spain to Turkey to Greece to Israel, so that is a lot of music already. After that, I love pop or funk associated music and so I deal with that and my own homegrown stuff and so there is a lot of stuff.


FJ: You have your fingers in everything.

AVISHAI COHEN: Totally, I've been into playing, I am known as a bass player, but I actually started as a piano player and I've been composing on the piano for years now and just around the piano. In the last two years, playing with Chick mainly, I have been very affected by the high quality of piano playing and sound from the piano and hearing that sound. I have been playing a lot more piano and lately, that has been my first thing, piano. I play mainly piano at home all the time.


FJ: So the probability for an Avishai Cohen plays piano record like Mingus is high?

AVISHAI COHEN: I'm sure there will because every record that I do, I play more and more piano. This last record, Colors, I am playing in a piano trio tune featuring myself on the piano. So that is a step. I am ready to make a piano record in a way, but on the other hand, there is many considerations when you develop yourself as an artist and my manager has advised to wait (laughing). But it is going to happen.


FJ: Using Ornette as an example as he plays the saxophone, violin, as well as the trumpet, do you fear that you are clouding your identity?

AVISHAI COHEN: Well, anything may happen. An artist that chooses to express himself and does well expressing himself, anything might happen to him. That I have learned through playing with greats and creating my own voice and exposing it. I have heard the best, but I have heard not the best too. But I mainly hear good things about what I do, but I know that as daring as I'm going to get and when I do get daring, then people like to say things because a lot of times, they fear what they don't know. They fear what is new to them. It may not be new to me or a decision that I make may appear to be not as clear to someone that might want to respond with a negative response just because he is not accustomed to it. But these are the things, as I get into doing what I am doing as a leader and as a decision maker, I am willing to take the chance or I am willing to hear whatever. I don't care. I want to do what I want to do.


FJ: As a leader, what are some of the essential qualities you look for when choosing whom you surround yourself with?

AVISHAI COHEN: Well, that is a good question, Fred. First of all, they have to answer the question, well, what I want them to have in order to play the music, at least some of what I hear, not all, I have learned that it is never going to be all of what I hear and that is a good thing because when I started doing this, I was always expecting to hear this perfect thing that I heard and I didn't even know what it was. But as I am getting more experience with it, I see that the more I give to the players, to express themselves and have their own take on it, the richer the music gets. They need to be good musicians because the music demands and aside to that, they need to be friends and open people and open to my whatever it is and the more that they are open and willing, the higher the music gets.


FJ: What are some of the lessons that you have learned in your time, however brief, as a leader?

AVISHAI COHEN: Well, I have learned that you have to treat your band musicians with the utmost respect and give them as much love and appreciation for what they do because they are very special people in my life. They choose to be a part of a moment that I am creating for myself at least in the world. It is a big message. It is an important thing to make a note of that and let them know how important they are in that process, which they are. That is something that I have learned for sure. Aside to that, I have learned that it is a tough world, making your decisions and statements and keeping at it. It is not easy at all. It is choosing, not the easy life, but at the same time, it is something I can't give up because it is a very big part of me and it gives me the most satisfaction. So I have discovered that it is definitely something that I need to be doing in order to fulfill my artistic and passionate needs.


FJ: Being a mild-mannered lay person, what drives an artist like yourself to create?

AVISHAI COHEN: I don't really know exactly what it is and I don't know if I want to know or if I will ever know. Somethings are left to be just hanging like that and they make sense as a living. I don't know what makes my body work like it works and I'm not making the effort to understand every molecule about it. At the same scale is the music thing. It is a very organic thing for me. I can say that maybe I'm crazy or what am I doing and what am I trying to get? Everybody to love me or something? Maybe I am, but it doesn't matter because I have a passion and my passion is to give way or to give life through my music because I know what it does to me to listen to music. It gives me life. It is the best thing I can feel in this world maybe. That is something that I want to give people and I get off from doing that. It excites my life to create a vibration through music. It is the most unbelievable, magical thing.


FJ: Did you ever anticipate the success that Adama, your debut recording on Stretch, achieved?

AVISHAI COHEN: Well, it is something I am realizing today more, Fred, or long after. While it was happening, I was realizing its success, but at the same time, you tend to go forward all the time. I tend to do that even when I do a great record, I am very excited about it, but the way for me to enjoy that record is to pretty much move on right away because if I stay thinking of how great things are, they become not great. Of course, I am appreciating whatever I realize as being received well and I am realizing today about Adama that I didn't realize then. Records like that and things like that take a long time to be understood more and appreciated. Faster than I think a lot of time, but at the same time, the realizing for the artist to realize the appreciation for his work is always, at least in my case, it comes later while you are doing something else already in a different heading, that is when you get the feedback of something that you did a long time ago.


FJ: And your latest, Colors?

AVISHAI COHEN: My artistic vision was, as always, to put the body of music that I have stored and kept in between the last record to that record. To put the most of my desire in music at the time on this record. Aside to that, I always have felt a connection between colors and music like other things with art. I felt that it would be nice to talk about that on Colors and give that perspective of that vision to the music. I think that the music is colorful. I think the tunes on the record, in all of my records, but this record in particular, from one tune to the other, there are different colors almost you can say and I wanted to try and express that through words and of course the music says what it says. Colors is just another piling of my music. It is simply that more than any other complicated answer that I can give you.


FJ: Colors is certainly a showcase for your compositions.

AVISHAI COHEN: That is a great thing, Fred. If you say that then I feel that I have accomplished another good body of work, which is basically what I am concerned about. I don't see, well, I have got to be honest. I love all my records, but on this record, I have realized after we did the record that it is a few levels or notches above the others in some ways that have to do with the growing up of people and the maturing of a band. The band is obviously tighter today than it was and more mature and everybody has gone through a long way since we started Adama. We know more and so it is more colorful. We know when to lay back and to not play. It makes a composition even stronger because holding back in art or in music is a quality that you learn to appreciate when you see that it is suddenly a part of you and that you have it. I see that in everybody in the band now. It is at the level that people know when not to play too or what not to do or what space to leave and that is a high level of composing I think. It is a higher level than what it was. We had that before, but it is at a higher level now.


FJ: As we turn the page onto a new year, what is next for Avishai Cohen?

AVISHAI COHEN: So much, Fred, as usual, but more than ever. In the last month, I just moved to a different apartment and so I have a view from here, which I haven't had in New York for eight years and my whole vision and spectrum and passion for the world has been growing wide because I see this every morning. I don't know. Music, I am thinking of many things. There is a trio record that we made with Chick a month ago that is one of the baddest records I have heard, seriously, of a trio. It is really, really, really scary.


FJ: Chick at the keys, you at the bass, fill in the missing piece of the puzzle for me.

AVISHAI COHEN: Jeff Ballard. It is a trio with Chick and this record is very, very, very, very good. This is going to do whatever is going to do and there is gigs and everything for the trio. That is with Chick. I am into other things too and I am working on this solo now. It is a tune that I am going to play with my band at Sweet Basil next week, but I took the basic thing about the song and made it into the song song. There are words that I am working on. I am not really sure. I can't tell you exactly. I am working on a song song, perhaps a single. I don't know how or when, but it is going to be good because it has to be good. It has to match all the other stuff that I do. It is too early to talk about that, but it is on my mind.


FJ: Rest at ease, we'll keep it on the down low.

AVISHAI COHEN: (Laughing) OK. Thanks.


Fred Jung is Jazz Weekly's Editor-In-Chief and did not kill Robert Blake's wife. Comments?  Email Fred.