Avishai Cohen: The Bassist Who Became a Bandleader of the World
The double bass is the instrument that usually stays in the background — the foundation beneath the soloists, rarely the star. Avishai Cohen spent his career proving that assumption wrong. A prodigiously gifted Israeli musician who first drew the jazz world's attention as a young man in Chick Corea's band, Cohen turned the bass into a lead voice and built one of the most distinctive bandleading and composing careers in modern jazz.
From Piano to Bass
Avishai Cohen was born on 20 April 1970 in Kabri, in the western Galilee. He began on the piano at nine, but at fourteen — after his family had spent time in St. Louis, where a teacher introduced him to the recordings of the electric-bass revolutionary Jaco Pastorius — he switched to the bass, and found his instrument. The conversion was total. He immersed himself in jazz, in the bass traditions of both the upright and the electric, and in the rich Mediterranean and Middle Eastern musical world he had grown up inside.
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In the 1990s Cohen moved to New York, the proving ground for any serious jazz musician, and within a few years he had achieved the thing every young player hopes for: recognition from a master. The pianist Chick Corea, one of the towering figures of modern jazz, brought Cohen into his bands — including the group Origin and the New Trio — and featured him as a central voice. Corea would publicly call Cohen one of the great bass talents he had encountered, and the association made Cohen, still young, a name across the international jazz scene.
A Voice of His Own
Cohen did not remain anyone's sideman. He launched his own career as a bandleader, releasing a long and acclaimed series of albums that fused the language of post-bop jazz with the melodies and rhythms of Israeli, Ladino, and Middle Eastern music. He developed, unusually, as a singer too, weaving his voice into his compositions, and his trios and larger ensembles toured the world. He became, for many listeners outside the United States, one of the faces of a thriving Israeli jazz movement that had taken root in New York and spread back home.
Why This Matters
Cohen matters because he expanded what his instrument could be. By making the double bass a melodic, singing lead voice and the centre of his own music, he changed how a generation of younger bassists imagined the role.
He matters, too, as a pioneer of the Israeli jazz wave. He was among the small group of Israeli musicians who went to New York, earned the respect of the American masters, and then built careers that carried the sound of their homeland into the centre of the jazz world. The boy who switched from piano to bass at fourteen because of a Jaco Pastorius record grew up to be the musician whose own records sent the next generation of Israeli players toward the bass.
Achievements
- Rose to international prominence in Chick Corea's groups (Origin, New Trio)
- Acclaimed bandleader with a long discography fusing jazz with Israeli and Middle Eastern music
- Pioneered the double bass as a melodic lead and singing voice
- A central figure of the international Israeli jazz movement
