Avishai Cohen, Yonathan Avishai, Barak Mori, Ziv Ravitz

CD version. Ashes to Gold is a five-part suite that the Tel Aviv trumpeter Avishai Cohen wrote in the weeks after the attack on Israel of 7 October 2023. It moves through anger, despair, melancholy and a stubborn hope, and it is the most fully composed of his ECM records. The title comes from kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold, and Cohen has stressed that the music is not all darkness.

Cohen leads his trusted quartet, with Yonathan Avishai on piano, Barak Mori on double bass and Ziv Ravitz on drums, and plays trumpet, flugelhorn and flute himself. In the past Cohen often handed the band new music only when they reached the studio. This time the pieces were worked out in detail beforehand, with less room for open improvisation and more for focused group interplay. The album was recorded in November 2023 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines by Gérard de Haro, with Manfred Eicher as executive producer.

Part I opens on Cohen's flute over a rubato passage from bass and piano, before he switches to trumpet above dark, rumbling chords. Part II is slower and meditative, built on bowed bass and a soft pulse from Ravitz's bass drum. The long fifth part closes the suite with solemnity rather than resolution. Cohen then turns to the Adagio assai from Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major, which had long been a highlight of the quartet's concerts. Its melancholy melody keeps the mood of the suite. The album ends with The Seventh, a simple, memorable tune by Cohen's teenaged daughter Amalia. Mori and Ravitz hold a steady groove while trumpet and piano embellish the melody.

Critics heard the record as a response to its moment. Jim Hynes in Making A Scene called it "one of 2024's most important musical statements", and noted that the suite evolved through live performance into its final shape. In The Free Jazz Blog (2024) Don Phipps described "a collection of sensitive, carefully crafted tone poems" and singled out the fifth part and The Seventh. Michael Toland of The Big Takeover found it more painterly than Cohen's earlier albums, with precise ensemble work in place of long solos.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2822, released on 11 October 2024, with all music by Avishai Cohen except the Ravel movement and his daughter's closing piece.