Avishai Cohen left Israel, where he spent his childhood and adolescence, to the United States to study at the reputed Berklee College of Music, in Boston, having then moved to New York, where he began his career in music, playing with several musicians from the New York jazz scene and becoming a member of many different groups, among which the influential SF JAZZ Collective and the Mingus Big Band, which will also perform at this year’s edition of Guimarães Jazz. In 2016, Avishai Cohen released his first album on the record label ECM, the impressionist Into the Silence, followed by his most recent work Cross My Palm With Silver (2017), which will probably be the main focus of the trumpeter’s performance.

The group of musicians that Avishai Cohen gathered to record his last album is formed, besides Cohen himself, by the pianist Yonathan Avishai, the bassist Barak Mori and the drummer Nasheet Waits, which in this concert will be replaced by Ziv Ravitz. The band that will perform in Guimarães Jazz is composed exclusively by Israeli musicians and, although all of them are experimented musicians with a solid reputation within the international circuit of jazz, there are no doubts that they all possess an expressivity characteristic of a geographically deterritorialized jazz. These musicians, like others who were also born in Israel such as Omer Avital and Omer Klein, are the living proof of a vibrant Israeli jazz scene, confirming the idea that the future of jazz is also made of new geographical latitudes and of heterodox references.

Although focused on Avishai Cohen’s compositions, broadly open to improvisation by nature, the music of this quartet is expansive and genetically multicultural. It breathes a very personal melody, made of a confluence of sounds, permeable to influences and sensible to cultural differences, in tune with the benign spirits of the time.