146: Dark Nights, by Avishai Cohen's Triveni

Avishai Cohen’s Triveni (Israel/USA)
Dark Nights (2014)
10 tracks, 53 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

This album is by jazz musician Avishai Cohen, originally from Tel Aviv but now based in New York. Weirdly, that sentence still leaves room for ambiguity. There’s a good reason why this guy usually goes by the name ‘Trumpeter Avishai Cohen’: to distinguish himself from the other New York-based Tel Avivian jazz musician Avishai Cohen, who is a double bassist. This album is by the trumpet guy.

Like yesterday’s, this is actually another artist I first heard at WOMEX, this time in 2015 in Budapest, Hungary. I’m not quite sure why he was there, to be honest. Well, playing a gig, obviously, but WOMEX is the ‘world music expo,’ and Cohen is pretty much straight-up jazz; there’s no obvious so-called ‘world’ influences to his music, on this album at least. But that’s okay, because I love it – always nice to have something a bit different show up.

This album is presented as ‘Avishai Cohen’s Triveni.’ A triveni is a poetic form in Hindi-Urdu with three lines, each of which relies on the other two; that’s why it’s a good name for a trio, and this one consists of Cohen himself on trumpet, Omer Avital on double bass and Nasheet Waits on drums. The name is an appropriate one for an ensemble like this, as the trio format – with no piano or guitar to bring the rhythms and the chords together – relies very heavily on the interplay between the individual musicians, with very little room to hide, as it were.

Not that these musicians need to. Dark Nights allows them each to show off their own prowess while remaining all of them understated. There’s no wild solos or viciously intricate head sections. It’s all rather stark and deliberate, without falling into sparseness – it feels as if there is always exactly the right amount happening at once. It’s not always just the three instruments going, though. An intriguing addition to the very classic sounding set-up is when Cohen’s trumpet is run through all sorts of effects and filters including distortion and wah-wah, and turning the trio into a quartet through the magic of overdubs. There’s quite a lot of ‘and Friends’ going on on this album too, with guest contributions from Anat Cohen (clarinet), Gerald Clayton (piano) and Keren Ann (vocals), but it doesn’t feel like a roll-call of special collaborations as they all slot into the ensemble so naturally without compromising that tightly-knit feel.

It’s always interesting to hear a style of music stripped back to its bare essentials, and Avishai Cohen’s Triveni does that with aplomb on Dark Nights, identifying the key elements that make the post-bop sound, taking away almost everything else and subtly updating what’s left to the 21st century. To quote Schoolhouse Rock, ‘no more, no less / you don't have to guess / when it's three, you can see / it's a magic number.’