Cross My Palm With Silver is the second ECM album by the Israeli trumpeter Avishai Cohen, following a year after Into The Silence, which he had written soon after his father's death. This time the five new pieces look outward. Cohen uses their titles to point at injustices at home and abroad, a small gesture of dissent, and the quartet plays them with the patience and restraint of a long-standing band.
Cohen calls the group his "dream team", and the ties are old ones. He has played with pianist Yonathan Avishai since both were twelve in Tel Aviv, and bassist Barak Mori is a friend from high school whose arrival, Cohen says, tied the band together. Drummer Nasheet Waits has been his partner for more than a decade. The quartet spent much of 2016 on the road, and Cohen brought the new material into the live sets shortly before the session. It was recorded in September 2016 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, with Gérard de Haro and Nicolas Baillard engineering and Manfred Eicher producing.
The opener, Will I Die, Miss? Will I Die?, grows over ten minutes from a short descending motif, first as a duet for trumpet and piano, then with bass, and finally as a waltz for the full band. Theme For Jimmy Greene is dedicated to the saxophonist whose six-year-old daughter was killed in the 2012 Newtown school shooting. It never quite settles, and leads into 340 Down, the only track without piano, inspired by a refugee boat that sank in the Mediterranean. Shoot Me In The Leg, at twelve minutes, holds Cohen's most dynamic playing, with Waits answering his flurries of notes.
In The Guardian, John Fordham heard echoes of the spaciousness of Into The Silence, but found "the sense of ensemble conversation is more urgent". On AllMusic, Matt Collar described a band straddling "straight-ahead jazz, classical, and the avant-garde", and called the record a bright spot in Cohen's discography. Not every critic agreed: in London Jazz News, Peter Bacon found it less immediately rewarding than its predecessor, a record of transition. Several reviewers placed Cohen's tone in the line of Miles Davis's quieter, more melancholy periods.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2548, released on 5 May 2017.
