Avishai E. Cohen, Yonathan Avishai, Barak Mori, Ziv Ravitz

There is a searching, yearning quality to Naked Truth, and a raw beauty and vulnerability in Avishai Cohen’s trumpet sound on his most improvisational ECM recording to date.  Very much music-of-the moment, found and shaped in the course of a remarkable recording session in the South of France, Naked Truth takes the form of an extemporaneous suite. For most of its length the Israeli trumpeter painstakingly leads the way, closely shadowed by his long-time comrades – pianist Yonathan Avishai, bassist Barak Mori and drummer Ziv Ravitz – who share an intuitive understanding, hyper alert to the music’s subtly-changing emphases.  At the album’s conclusion, Cohen recites “Departure”, a poem by Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky, whose themes of renunciation, acceptance and letting go seem optimally-attuned to the mood of the music. Naked Truth was recorded at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, in September 2021, and produced by Manfred Eicher. 

‘Naked Truth’ is a somber, meditative piece broken up into eight parts and ending with a ninth, a kind of coda in which trumpeter and leader Avishai Cohen reads (in English translation) ‘Departure,’ a poem by the late Israeli poet Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky. In her poem, Mischkovsky dramatizes the act of dying as a series of departures, beginning with ‘the departure from the splendour of the skies and the colours of earth.’ Recorded in September 2021 in a town in Provence called Pernes-les-Fontaines (it’s near Avignon), the suite is played by Cohen with pianist Yonathan Avishai, bassist Barak Mori, and drummer Ziv Ravitz. […] To this listener, the quartet generates a drama of gradual enlightenment, as if extroversion signified some sort of illumination. The early parts seem to dole out flickers of development, an impression left by a slight crescendo in the background as well as brief ventures into the high ranges of the trumpet. […] ‘Naked Truth’ is a beautifully executed meditation on the last things.
Michael Ullman, Arts Fuse