Dark Nights by Avishai Cohen

Dark Nights is the soul-deep third album from rising-star trumpeter Avishai Cohen’s trio Triveni with bassist Omer Avital and drummer Nasheet Waits. Dark Nights also features guest performances by superstar clarinetist Anat Cohen and pianist Gerald Clayton. Avishai is also joined by French-Israeli singer-songwriter Keren Ann for a duet on “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” which sees the two indulging their shared love of Chet Baker. The purview of Dark Nights is wide, from intimate lyricism to electrifying virtuosity, from jazz standards to progressive originals. The classic balladry of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” and Charles Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” rubs shoulders with electronics-stoked compositions from Avishai’s pen that groove hard and burn slow, by turns. The New York Times has praised him as “an extravagantly skilled trumpeter, relaxed and soulful. . . deftly combining sensitivity and flair,” while DownBeat raved over the previous Triveni release, saying: “Cohen and company improvise together so wonderfully that they often sound shocked at their collective inventions.” Avishai is a member of the hit 3 Cohens band with his siblings Anat and Yuval, as well as the all-star SF Jazz Collective. But Dark Nights is Avishai Cohen’s state of the art.