If you were to ask jazz trumpeter Avishai Cohen what prompted him to title his new ECM Recording Cross My Palm With Silver, he’ll tell you that he was inspired by the expression’s origin wherein a silver coin is played across a fortuneteller’s hand before having your future told.
“It talks about the titles of the tracks that are, in a way, about current evens, socially and what’s going on,” he says over the phone from Chicago. “That’s the question, ‘what’s to come? Where are we headed as human beings, as a society?'”
The Avishai Cohen Quartet will be playing this Friday and Saturday night at the bluewhale. He will no doubt feature work from the new recording and perhaps selections from his previous record Into the Silence. In Silence he processed the passing of his father. Cross My Palm… is more political in nature, but no less stunningly beautiful.
“Is music going to change the world,” Cohen asks. “They say yes it does, in a sense, but….” There’s a pregnant pause before he continues. “The first track, ‘Will I Die Miss, Will I Die?’ is about Syria and what’s going on in Syria. What can we do to change things? To really bring a change as human beings to society and how we are. I’m questioning that in music, writing music -it’s just another platform and another reason to talk about it, to think about it and the reader or the listener should do whatever they can.”
One thing he doesn’t believe is going to bring about change is posting about issues. “I don’t see much happening today besides posting about it,” he offers. “That’s the other go-to solution is to write a post and then you feel very active about things. ‘I’m very politically active, I post about it all the time.’ That’s why I talk about the feeling of hopelessness.”
With his seemingly effortless command of the trumpet, Cohen is often compared, rather inevitably, to Miles Davis who long advocated that “an instrument should be an extension of you; it’s supposed to sound like you.” Does Cohen agree with Davis? “That is my path, my role and I’m trying to get as honest as I can and the playing is a constant search. You find it, you lose it, because we are changing constantly. It’s the questions of who you are. Who am I?”
His role as a bandleader came about simply because there weren’t a lot of ensembles that used trumpet players. “I better make it myself,” he realized. “After graduating all I wanted to do was to play and get a gig. It wasn’t a notion of making my own band. For the first time in my life I only do my band and I have no other sideman gigs.”
Which might surprise the ten-year-old Cohen who would stand on a soap box and play with a big band. What advice would he give that boy now? “Keep going with that search of who you are, finding who you are. That’s the only thing we can find out. We cannot be anything else anyway. It’s a good question.”
Before ending the interview he wanted to add one more piece of advice for his younger self. “Just be kind.”
Photo Credit: Di Perri/ECM Records
