It not just what Avishai Cohen does, it’s the way that he does it. The Israeli master bassist and composer’s recent music – taking in bustling bebop or salsa sprees, marriages of string sections and improvising oboists or oud players, Sephardic folk songs and maybe the odd Red Army theme – might just look like standard-issue modern genre-bending when written as a list. But Cohen has an instinct not always shared by virtuosi who can get their heads and hands around just about anything: he’s a born entertainer.
Cohen and his band were visibly moved by the cheers that greeted their Barbican show – even louder than those for Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock there last week – but if his gigs generally exhibit that gusto, the reaction can hardly have been a surprise.
This was Cohen’s most explicitly jazz-rooted group in several recent UK visits, with the elegantly businesslike New York sidemen Diego Urcola (trumpet/flugelhorn), Steve Davis (trombone) and Kurt Rosenwinkel (guitar) rounding out the Israeli’s regular trio, featuring gifted young pianist Nitai Hershkovits and drummer Daniel Dor. At first the band played with a warm and purring swing (like a Benny Golson group with folk leanings), but Song for My Brother, with its solemn piano intro, ravishingly romantic theme, soft brass harmonies and tenderly muscular bass solo established Cohen’s most familiar folk-jazz agenda. A cruising jazz groove on Shuffle brought shapely solos from Urcola, Davis, and a surprisingly flute-toned Rosenwinkel, and the first half hit a thrilling climax from the slinkily forceful drummer Dor, while Cohen pulled percussive bass accents like an archer releasing a bowstring. Bass Suite No 1 (from the leader’s 1997 debut album) later mixed a seductively sliding bass vamp with delicate trills and drumlike clatters on the woodwork, and a headlong piece of trio freebop wound up with the whole band swapping phrases as if they’d just run across each other on a small-hours jam.
Cohen sang Nature Boy as a haunting encore, then a ballad for his father, which he accompanied with simultaneous bass-strummings and woodwork-slapping, before speeding into a salsa burnup that pulled the audience from the edges of their seats to their feet.
