Very powerful concert on Tuesday, the Avishai Cohen (the Trumpet) Quartet at the Cadogan Hall as part of the London Jazz Festival. He’s been high on my ‘must see’ list for a while – one of the many downsides of Brexit is that a lot of the artists I love, especially on labels like ECM, appear to do non-UK European tours a lot more than they used to. Musically, an astonishing mixture of technical brilliance, raw emotion and telepathic understanding within the group – the first piece was a 25-minute reworking of most of last year’s Naked Truth album, which I know well enough to hear how much it’s being reimagined in the moment; not least, a much more obvious klezmer element in some of the faster sections.
And then the man stepped up to the microphone, offered the conventional greetings, praise for the support act and band introductions, and then (I paraphrase, in the Thucydidean manner; if a proper transcript appears anywhere I’ll link it and correct as necessary):
I guess we have to talk about this. We are from Israel. [loud applause from one part of the audience] Israel is a small country, we all know people who were directly affected by what happened on 7th October. I call my son, and he says, Sorry, Dad, got to go, there’s another alert. So many dead, and the ones taken hostage… But every mother who loses a child breaks the heart. So many more dead in Gaza. [louder applause from other parts of the audience] We are just musicians. We play from the heart, and I have to think, how can I play music at a time like this? October, I was supposed to be writing new music for an album that we’ll record after this tour. How can I write? I talk to Yonathan [Avishai, the pianist] about cancelling the whole thing, but he persuades me to carry on. And so this next piece, which we play for just the second time, is music expressing this time, from our hearts. [cue complex, raw, abstract suite with quite a lot of flute and electronic effects, which will be awesome on record]
Cohen isn’t an overtly political artist – not like the late Jamie Branch’s entertaining denunciations of Amerikkka, say, or the explicit polemical agenda of Gilad Atzmon in relation to Israel and Palestine. Plus, it’s jazz; if you don’t have singing or lyrics, or give your songs provocative titles, you could surely get away with not addressing world affairs, pretending (with audience complicity) that you can just focus on the music, let it speak for itself. This must be tempting, especially if your stance is not My Saxophone Is A Weapon Of The Revolution but trying to express conflicted feelings on a topic where, to some, the moral red lines seem obvious.
But of course art is political, especially if you’re an artist who draws inspiration from the world rather than just from the history of the form. That doesn’t (necessarily) require taking a side, even if that might be more comfortable – the risk of a position that is, essentially, “it’s all painful and complicated” is that it doesn’t satisfy anyone for whom it is not actually that complicated, where taking a side at least brings you the unequivocal support and solidarity of those on that side.
Cohen’s music acknowledges its roots; it both celebrates and questions them, making something new rather than merely repeating the past; it is fragmented, fractured, uncertain, highly individual and yet – not least in its dependence on the close, reciprocal relationship between the four musicians – social rather than solipsistic. For the most part, it does speak for itself, powerfully and sometimes painfully. At this moment, such an explanatory speech was probably unavoidable, and it was as good an example of trying sincerely to find a balance as one can imagine – but I would certainly rather hear him again, and failing that hear the future album, than have an essay’s worth of such thoughts.
Leave a comment