Avishai Cohen
Gently Disturbed

From Israel to New York, he shares the stage with legendary jazz figures such as Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Bobby McFerrin, and Roy Hargrove, enchanting them with his pure talent and impressive technique on the double bass and electric bass. Within the same decade, he produces no less than eight albums, delivering evidence of his ingenious compositional intuition that leads Down Beat magazine to label him as an "authentic jazz visionary". Just four lines of a curriculum with encyclopedic value; this is Avishai Cohen.

And without further ado, "Gently Disturbed" is an extraordinary album in the purest and simplest sense of the term; the written translation of an uncommon approach to understanding music. Nothing could be further from the standard jazz repertoire of the piano-bass-drums trio formula. This is where the magic of Avishai Cohen lies. The preference for raucous rhythmic entanglements beginning with the decomposition of sound into divided rhythmic units, which come to life and voice in stages, like drops of notes that become rain. Each individual track maintains the rarefied liquidity, the sense of improvisation, and the dispersion intrinsic to jazz in a continuous stream composed of changes in intensity, color, and tone. Yet it is a mathematical, organized, and precise album in striking centripetal waves of sound identical to each other but always different, new, layered one upon another. It brushes against the "punk jazz" of Jaco Pastorius with the hard, percussive drive of the bass, the harmonic structures of the piano slipping between Chick Corea and the more bucolic Philip Glass, and a captivating timekeeping composed of rhythmical boleros on the drums with a subtly flamenco character but capable of springing just under the beat in the manner of be-bop.

Like Mediterranean waves on the shores of Manhattan.