Israeli jazz musician Avishai Cohen is only 38 years old. But he’s a fast-rising star in his profession.
Cohen played in Kyiv on Oct. 18 during the “Jazz in Kyiv” festival, sharing the spotlight with such performers as the legendary Al Jarreau and the great Dave Holland.
A “jazz visionary of global proportions” is what the American magazine Down Beat called Cohen. Bass Player magazine called him “one of the 100 most influential bass players of the 20th century.” Legendary pianist Chick Corea dubbed him “a great composer” and “a genius musician.”
After his concert, Cohen talked to the Kyiv Post and discussed how his career formed from childhood. As it turns out, one of his great influences is music imported into Israel by Russian Jews.
“After the World War II, many Russian people came to live in Israel. There were people from Poland and the Czech Republic, too. They brought songs and melodies of the Red Army with them. All of them were military songs. But the melodies were so beautiful that they came up with lyrics in Hebrew for them,” Cohen said. “Young people now don’t even know they are Russian. It’s funny that Russian people don’t like these songs because they are about war and stuff. But I took some of them as they are so beautiful, so well-composed.”
As a kid, Cohen learned those Russian melodies. He heard his parents singing them with friends. “I grew up on them,” he said. “I am made of them.”
The Israeli-born Cohen, whose parents were also natives of Israel, had other musical influences as well.
His mother is Turkish and Greek, with ancestors who were Spanish Jews. And his father has Polish and Czech roots. “So, I am half-Eastern European and half-Sephardic,” he said.
The blend of cultures helped to determine Cohen’s signature sound, a blend of Middle Eastern, Eastern European and African-American musical idioms.
These influences were all on display at the “Jazz in Kyiv” concert on Oct. 18, where he performed before hundreds of people at the International Center for Culture and Arts. This is Cohen’s second performance in Kyiv. He performed the day before in Kharkiv.
“We remember you!” an adoring fan shouted from the front row. His first concert, performed at the Philharmonic, turned him and his simple jazz sound into a sensation in Ukraine.
He took the Kyiv stage in an extremely modest grey T-shirt and dark trousers, announcing: “We have a lot of music for you and great musicians.” He and his soloist, Karen Malka, sang the whole concert in Hebrew, including the compositions based on Russian melodies.
He played expressively and with great energy. He bit his lip and even stuck out his tongue. Avishai played contrabass with his fingers, then bows, and also beat the instrument as a drum. After that, he easily turns to electric guitar. His drummer, Mark Guiliana, percussionist Itamar Doari and guitarist Eyal Heler are also virtuosos. Shai Maestro, for example, simultaneously plays piano with one hand and keyboard with another.
Finally, Cohen urged the audience to join in the performance, asking everybody to make noise. He added to the volume with a two-fingered whistle.
Later, in his Kyiv Post interview, he said he much preferred Kyiv to Kharkiv, which he described as kind of “dead.”
“There are young people,” Cohen said. “It’s more modern, more like a big city. I feel love from the people. When I feel love, I come back.”
He loved Kyiv enough to teach a master class the next day to about 100 or so students at the Educational Center Master Class in the Pechersk District. The Kyiv Post came along to watch. He came on stage in a sports suit. “I used to practice much more than I do now, many hours a day,” he told the students. “Now I am busy with concerts. I don’t have enough time.”
Cohen began studying piano at age 11. In high school he switched to the electric bass guitar. At 16, he enrolled in the Music & Arts High School in Jerusalem. He served in the Israeli army and only then decided to try acoustic bass, which became his main instrument. But he still writes songs as he plays the piano.
At age 21, Cohen decided to conquer New York. He studied at the New School and Mannes College of Music.
He moved to New York without any real connections and had an inauspicious beginning.
In those lean times, he paid the rent by working as a mover and in construction. He played bass in the streets, subways and parks. “The first year was the most difficult in my life,” he told Russian Time News.
But the hard times didn’t last long. Within a year, he started playing professionally. Three years later, he started performing abroad.
“After five years, Chick Corea invited me to join his band,” Cohen said. “So it took me 10 years to make some connections in the jazz scene. But now that everybody knows me, I can arrange concerts and release albums.”
Cohen played with Corea, a multiple Grammy Award-winning American jazz pianist, until 2002. But Cohen always dreamed of being a band leader and playing his own compositions.
“Playing with Chick, I got everything you ever want to get,” Cohen said. “I received a lot of experience playing with great musicians and we became friends. But I was happy when people wanted to hear my music too. It was the next stage of my career.”
In 2003, Cohen founded his own label, Razdaz, and has already released five albums. His latest album “Gently Disturbed,” which came out in May, is far from the standard jazz repertoire. He promotes it on his official website (www.avishaimusic.com) as “an amalgamation of melody and groove, complexity and simplicity, that nearly redefines the concept of jazz.”
But Cohen doesn’t forget classic jazz. At the master class, he played the famous “You and the Night and the Music.”
His audience was impressed. “We can neither play nor learn to play like him,” one student of the Kyiv Music Academy told his classmates with a tinge of regret, after listening to Cohen’s music.But plenty will get a chance to listen to him. Cohen has more than a dozen concerts monthly and his tours are scheduled eight months in advance.
