Manfred Eicher, visionary founder of Munich’s boundary-busting ECM Records, once described a band led by the Tel Aviv-born, New York-honed trumpeter/composer Avishai Cohen as “one big octopus.” Eicher noticed that Cohen conjures bands in which the participants are individual limbs that react spontaneously within an ineffable group mind, yet never lose their individuality – much like the band-leading methods of Miles Davis, Cohen’s key model. Naked Truth is a barely-40-minute miniature of an album, beautifully executed and steered by the idea that improvising musicians good enough to play any headlong stream of consciousness can reveal a lot more if they sometimes play only a fraction of what they know.
