Israeli bassist Avishai Cohen is an alchemist at heart. Finding inspiration in musicians ranging from Bach to Stevie Wonder, Avishai can transform a tired Israeli school tune back into poetic gold. He can take the Sephardic melodies his grandfather sang in prayer, or his mother hummed while washing dishes, and make them groove. He can take a sinuous and spontaneous jazz bass line turn it into a top forty hit.
Avishai’s joyful powers of transformation are in full force on Aurora, an album turning roots into lyrical, intense songs that showcase not only Avishai’s masterful bass and lifelong musical loves, but his newfound voice.
“It’s a very good practice for any musician, to learn to sing. It’s a beautiful practice in humility, an ongoing craft,” Avishai explains, musing on why he took up singing after decades as a successful jazz bassist. “But you have to take care. You have to like yourself enough to listen to yourself. To accept things that don’t always come out just how you imagined them. It is very exposed.”
Though Avishai’s first performance as a vocalist came at an American summer camp, where a boogie-woogie loving music director got the kids singing songs from Free to Be You and Me, he dropped the idea of combining his chosen instrument and his voice for decades. Years later, at a New York club, Avishai was blown away by Andy Gonzalez “an unsung hero of Latin bass, who effortlessly sang along while brilliantly powering the rhythm section. “I asked him how he managed it,” Avishai recalls. “He just looked at me and said in his characteristically New York tough way, ‘Yeah, it took me a minute or two.’”
