Music and Recording Reviews

Avishai Cohen: Ashes to Gold
Cohen, trumpet, flugelhorn, flute; Yonathan Avishai, piano; Barak Mori, bass; Ziv Ravitz, drums
ECM 2822 (CD, available as LP). 2024. "An ECM Production"; Gérard de Haro, eng.
Performance ****½
Sonics *****

Press notes describe this music as "mirroring the deep tensions of a troubled era." It is especially troubled for someone whose home country is Israel. That is where Avishai Cohen composed his five-part suite for this album. He wrote it soon after the Hamas attack on Israel and the outbreak of war in October 2023. He says that he worked "during the full craziness ... with rockets flying over my head, alarms and sirens going off."

Cohen is a leading figure in the Israeli contingent that has become so important to jazz in the last 20 years. He is a deeply soulful, searching, technically brilliant, idiosyncratically lyrical trumpet player. He often makes concept albums. It feels wrong to call Ashes to Gold a concept album. It is more like a spiritual diary from a time of lethal crisis.

Part I of the suite begins with Cohen (on flute, his new instrument) floating over the rubato markings of bassist Barak Mori and pianist Yonathan Avishai. But quietude cannot prevail. After Cohen switches to trumpet, turbulence gradually overtakes the ensemble until Cohen erupts in searing blasts and shattering runs.

Ashes to Gold sounds free and impulsive because of all the wild breakouts and sudden hard turns. The suite is a complex emotional journey. Mori's arco bass and Avishai's piano embody the mourning. Cohen's trumpet cries render the rage and the anguish.

Cohen said that he did not imagine this music as "only dark." He also sought hope. On Part III, over stately bass and solemn piano, Cohen, on trumpet, traces a heart-breaking melody. One of the paradoxes of art is that pain, portrayed truthfully, can be beautiful. Beauty, inherently, contains hope. Ashes to Gold is Avishai Cohen's most important work to date.—Thomas Conrad

Matt Slocum: Lion Dance
Matt Slocum, drums; Walter Smith III, tenor saxophone; Larry Grenadier, bass
Sunnyside SSC 1745 (CD, available as LP). 2024. Jerome Sabbagh, prod.; James Farber, eng.
Performance ****
Sonics ****½

It feels like there are more saxophone trios than ever these days. It is a small niche with a rich history. Towering figures like Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, and Joe Henderson set the paradigm.

Lion Dance is a strong new example, and a test case for what is so appealing (for listeners) and so challenging (for players) about the sax/bass/drums format. Such stripped-down ensembles contain much open air. Each instrument is naked and exposed. On Lion Dance, tenor saxophonist Walter Smith III invents fresh melodies in space, with no harmonic support except "horizontal chords" (notes of a chord played consecutively rather than simultaneously). The source of this harmony is bassist Larry Grenadier. He is also a source of interesting solos, full of countermelodies. In a sax trio, everyone is expected to solo.

The leader is drummer Matt Slocum. He had never made a sax trio album before, but he is suited to the format. He is a complete musician who plays drums. He has reliable instincts for detail and shading. His solo on Thelonious Monk's "We See" reveals that he is the third melodist in this trio. And he writes nice tunes. "Persona" is haunting. So is the title track, "Lion Dance," in sinuous 9/4.

Slocum, unlike so many current jazz musicians, is interested in applying the distinctive voices in his band to standard repertoire. He turns Smith loose to veer and flow through "This Is All I Ask." Smith smears himself around in a dead-slow "What Is There to Say?"

Engineer James Farber recorded and mixed the album live to two-track analog tape. Farber puts Smith on the left, with Slocum on the right and Grenadier in the center. It feels real. The sound is so plain and exact that you imagine you could reach out and touch them.—Thomas Conrad

John Hollenbeck: Colouring Hockets
John Hollenbeck, drums; Marcio Doctor, percussion; Patricia Brennan, vibraphone, marimba; Matt Moran, vibraphone, marimba; NDR Bigband
Flexatonic 003 (CD). 2024. Michael Dreyer, Marcio Doctor, Adrian von Ripka, prods.; Manuel Glowczewski, eng.; Jan Henning Merget, asst. eng./DAW operator.
Performance ****
Sonics ****

The most talented big band jazz composer working today, drummer John Hollenbeck has scored another success with his ninth big band recording in the past two decades. Now based in Montreal, where he teaches at McGill University, Hollenbeck was commissioned to write this collection by the NDR Bigband, a group founded in Hamburg, Germany, by public broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk. Hollenbeck's in-house collaborator, NDR Bigband percussionist Marcio Doctor, has been quoted as describing Colouring Hockets as "Rhythm being the driving force, but with an emphasis on timbre and texture as well." A hocket is a contrapuntal device in medieval music whereby a melody is interrupted.

"Marimba Hocket" features a pair of longtime Hollenbeck collaborators, vibraphonists Matt Moran and Patricia Brennan, who play marimba as well as vibes, along with Doctor and Hollenbeck. The pause comes near the composition's conclusion, where the ensemble breaks down in cacophony before a slight melody, mostly on horns, creeps back in for a quiet end.

At the heart of this beautifully recorded album is the masterful "Entitlement," which opens with saxophones playing a melancholy theme that eventually rises amid cymbal crashes. After a breakdown—a classic example of Hollenbeck's skill with working the loud-soft dynamic to its fullest expression—the composition rides through a midtempo middle section where horn patterns between trumpets, trombones, and saxophones mix.

The piece devolves to just drums and percussion before a final beboppish coda of percussion and piano that ends with horns holding the final chords. The modern big band maestro at work.—Robert Baird