Since his emergence in Chick Corea’s trio in 1997, the Israeli-born double bassist Avishai Cohen has become a global star for his bass sound that joins cello-like purity to percussive drama, and for original compositions embracing American jazz, Latin music, Sephardic-Jewish folk song, avant-funk, orchestral works, even pop-tinged vocals.
Cohen’s 2021 album Two Roses was a sympathetic jazz/classical collaboration with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, while 2019’s Arvoles was the opposite: an elegant chamber-musical expansion of the intimacies of a jazz piano trio. But Shifting Sands is something exhilaratingly different – starker, simpler, coming straight from the leader’s palpable delight in jamming with energetic kindred spirits after the isolations of the pandemic.
