Avishai Cohen, Yonathan Avishai, Barak Mori, Ziv Ravitz

CD version. Naked Truth is the most improvised of the Israeli trumpeter Avishai Cohen's ECM albums, a suite in nine parts found and shaped in a single studio session. It grows from an eight-note motif that Cohen had lived with since the start of the pandemic, and it closes with him reading a poem about letting go. At about 35 minutes it is short, spare and unusually exposed, with a raw, searching trumpet sound at its centre.

This is Cohen's fifth album for ECM, after Into the Silence, Cross My Palm with Silver, Playing the Room and Big Vicious. He is joined by long-time partners Yonathan Avishai on piano, Barak Mori on double bass and Ziv Ravitz on drums. ECM writes that the melodies "didn't want to be written down" in advance, and that the band had one rehearsal and one small concert before the session. Cohen asked them to listen to the bansuri player Hariprasad Chaurasia, and asked Ravitz to keep percussive detail to a minimum. The recording took place in September 2021 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, with Gérard de Haro as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer.

The motif is heard at the start of Part II, where Avishai's cascading piano figure meets a slow, longing line from the muted trumpet. Part IV opens as a sparse duet of trumpet and Ravitz on toms, cymbals and mallets, then Mori takes over and the group builds to a faster tempo. In Part V the piano plays a hymn-like melody, joyful and sad at once. The last movement, Departure, is Cohen's reading of a poem by Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky that treats dying as a series of departures. He translated it from Hebrew with Sharon Mohar.

The Guardian made it its jazz album of the month, with John Fordham calling it Cohen's "quietest but maybe boldest adventure". In DownBeat in 2022 Paul de Barros wrote: "This is not music that socks you in the teeth, but give it a little time and it will enchant you." For Michael Ullman in The Arts Fuse it was a meditation on the last things.

CD edition, ECM 2737, released in February 2022.