Avishai Cohen, Yonathan Avishai, Barak Mori, Ziv Ravitz

LP version. Ashes to Gold is the sixth ECM album by Avishai Cohen, the trumpeter from Tel Aviv (not the bassist of the same name), built around a five-part suite written after the Hamas attack on Israel of 7 October 2023. Cohen had planned to compose during a month off at home and found that he "could not write anything". Most of the suite was then drafted in about a week. The title refers to kintsugi, the Japanese craft of repairing broken ceramics with gold.

The band is his long-standing quartet with pianist Yonathan Avishai, bassist Barak Mori and drummer Ziv Ravitz, with Cohen on trumpet, flugelhorn and, as a new voice in the group, flute. It was Avishai who persuaded him not to cancel the tour and the recording. On earlier ECM albums the musicians had seen the music only in the studio. This time Avishai and Mori had a week with part of it, and Cohen defined beats, accents and crescendos in detail. The session took place in November 2023 at Studios La Buissonne, engineered by Gérard de Haro.

The suite opens with Cohen on flute over a rubato passage from bass and piano, before the trumpet enters and the drama tightens. Part III took shape after a rehearsal in Romania, its theme worked out on a small Casio in a local studio. The ten-minute Part V grows from a dancing piano ostinato. After the suite comes the Adagio assai from Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major, a concert staple of the quartet, led by flugelhorn with double bass. In 2023 Cohen and Avishai had played Ravel with Martha Argerich at her festival in Hamburg. The album closes on The Seventh, a simple melody by Cohen's teenage daughter Amalia.

In The Big Takeover, Michael Toland found the album more painterly than earlier Cohen records and wrote that "it may well be the leader's masterpiece". Jim Hynes of Making A Scene called it "one of 2024's most important musical statements". Cohen himself hears the music, in his hopeful reading, as more than dark: something golden made from the fragments.

This edition is the vinyl LP, ECM 2822, of an album first released in October 2024 an ECM production with Manfred Eicher credited as executive producer.