The latest release from Avishai Cohen’s quartet, Ashes to Gold, eloquently expresses the breadth and depth of raw emotions provoked by the atrocities of October 7, 2023, and the tragedies of the ensuing war. Its heart-piercing five-part title suite gives voice to anger, horror, grief, tenderness, and a glimmer of determined hope, driven home by virtuosic performances. On March 21, Albuquerque will have the opportunity to hear the quartet—with Cohen (trumpet, flugelhorn, flute), Yonathan Avishai (piano), Barak Mori (bass), and Ziv Ravitz (drums)—live at the Outpost, part of the quartet’s first U.S. tour in five years.
Avishai Cohen had planned to spend time in the early the fall of 2023 writing the music for his quartet’s next album, in advance of a European tour that would conclude with a recording session for the new music. That plan was interrupted by October 7, 2023.
“All that time that I laid aside to write music went down the drain,” he says, speaking in an interview from Tel Aviv. “I was speechless and heartbroken and devastated, and the last thing I was thinking of was music. Almost to the point where a week before we were supposed to be going on tour, I still did not touch my horn, did not touch the piano, did not touch anything, you know. I thought, I’m not going to play music for a year.”
When Cohen told the quartet’s pianist Yonathan Avishai that he was going to cancel the tour, Avishai urged him to write the music. “We have to go play,” said Avishai.
The intensity of his response moved Cohen to start work, and he wrote the bulk of the music in a week’s time, with additional parts being composed on the road, including the moving part III, a short, grieving funeral march. “It kind of opened the door to channel sadness and anger and agony and disbelief of this reality we’re living in, and hope for the end of this, and you know, a lot of anger for anyone who controlled this situation and let it last that long,” he says.
The suite might be described as classical chamber music with a jazz accent. Cohen is most inclined to swing when he picks up his trumpet, but he listens at home more to classical music, and compositionally, he says, “I’m way more into long forms lately.” While the suite certainly has room for improvisation, Cohen was much more detailed than usual about how and what he wanted each musician to play, “because the subject is so fragile, and it had to be accurate,” he says. “So in the past, I could be more loose about it and have more room for interpretation for my musicians, but in this case, yeah, maybe more like a classical music. It was written more specifically.”
The bracing depth of feeling in the music and performances reflects Cohen’s sense of responsibility to reflect and protest against the present reality. “We have shame and hate and division instead of compassion and love and united, you know. So this is going on in Israel and in the States and in Europe. Many places are heading that way, and it’s very dark times.”
As musicians, he and the quartet address this “first of all, with playing our hearts out, you know. I try to do music the most intense and the most honest way that I can,” he says. “I speak out in interviews and in my shows. . . . My music is reflecting the reality. It’s not ignoring that and making some pretty music just to make the day, you know.”
The album’s title, Ashes to Gold, came to Cohen after the music was written. It refers to the Japanese art of ceramic repair work “where you take the old and broken and try to put the pieces back together to make something golden and beautiful from the fragments,” Cohen has said. He sees this as a reflection of our current reality. In the Ashes to Gold suite, Cohen has reassembled the broken pieces of our world into a compelling and deeply moving masterwork—and a cry for peace and understanding.
Avishai Cohen Quartet
March 21 at 7:30 p.m.
Weil Hall
Outpost Performance Space, Albuquerque
Tickets $15–$35, available here
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© 2025 Mel Minter