Yonathan Avishai

Joys and Solitudes is the first album under his own name on ECM for Israeli-French pianist Yonathan Avishai, after two appearances on the label in the quartet of trumpeter Avishai Cohen. It presents the trio he had been developing for about five years. One Ellington standard opens the set, followed by seven originals that draw on blues, swing, African music and his own travels, played with a striking economy of means.

Avishai was born in Tel Aviv and spent his early childhood in Japan, where his father was studying. He grew up alongside Cohen, began playing with him at thirteen, and moved to France in 2000, living for more than a decade in the Dordogne before settling nearer Paris. His partners are Yoni Zelnik, a Paris-based Israeli double bassist, and Donald Kontomanou, a French drummer of Guinean and Greek heritage. Before this album the trio had already recorded in France under the name Modern Times. Joys and Solitudes was recorded at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano in February 2018, with Stefano Amerio as engineer and Manfred Eicher producing.

The programme opens with Duke Ellington's Mood Indigo, taken very slowly over a ticking hi-hat and spare bass. Gradually Avishai adds dissonance and quick tremolos. "Ellington is still a thoroughly modern pianist and composer," he says. Tango was his response to hearing Dino Saluzzi and Anja Lechner's ECM album Ojos Negros, an attempt to catch its colour rather than to write a dance number. The twelve-minute When Things Fall Apart was inspired by Cohen's Into The Silence. Its title comes from a book by the Buddhist writer Pema Chödrön. Les Pianos De Brazzaville closes the album and recalls his journeys to the Republic of the Congo.

Ron Simpson of The Jazz Rag found Avishai "a subtle, always accessible pianist, often delicate and restrained, but rhythmically alert, too". In Jazz Magazine, Pierre de Chocqueuse wrote that this first trio album for ECM confirmed him as an inspired composer as well as a major pianist. Brian Marley, writing for London Jazz News in 2019, praised the trio's timing and noted that Zelnik and Kontomanou enter and leave the music almost imperceptibly.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2611, released on 25 January 2019.