Into the Silence is the first ECM album led by the Tel Aviv-born trumpeter Avishai Cohen, a suite of six pieces. He wrote them in the months after his father David died in November 2014. It is music of mourning, slow and spacious, for a quartet with tenor saxophone added. Cohen has said the title refers to "the silence of absence", and the record keeps that silence audible, with long rests and a muted trumpet that rarely raises its voice.
Many listeners first noticed Cohen on Mark Turner's ECM album Lathe of Heaven in 2014. For his own debut he chose pianist Yonathan Avishai, a friend since their childhood in Tel Aviv. With him are bassist Eric Revis, a cornerstone of the Branford Marsalis quartet for two decades, and drummer Nasheet Waits. Bill McHenry, a saxophonist who has worked with Paul Motian and Andrew Cyrille, shadows the trumpet lines on tenor. The album was recorded in July 2015 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, engineered by Gérard de Haro with Nicolas Baillard and produced by Manfred Eicher.
The opening Life and Death sets the tone, muted trumpet floating over pauses that the rhythm section marks as firmly as its sparse accompaniment. Dream Like a Child, the longest piece at over fifteen minutes, recalls the father's hope that his children would become musicians, which all three did. The title track grew from a dissonant piano figure that came to Cohen in his parents' house shortly after the death. It builds real harmonic and rhythmic turmoil before falling quiet. The record closes with a short epilogue, Avishai alone at the piano reprising the opening theme.
Critics heard the shadow of Miles Davis in Cohen's muted sound, but also a personal language within it. Giving five stars in The Guardian, John Fordham heard trumpet and sax exchanges recalling Davis and Wayne Shorter in the 1960s. He called it "beautiful contemporary music for just about anyone". In DownBeat, Jim Macnie described "a somber program that's well calibrated, poetic and straight from the heart". JazzTimes made it an Editor's Pick, and Jon Turney in London Jazz News found the recording itself excellent, the drums above all.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2482, first released on 29 January 2016.
