Avishai Cohen, Yonathan Avishai

CD version. Playing The Room is the first duo album by trumpeter Avishai Cohen and pianist Yonathan Avishai, two musicians who began exploring jazz together as teenagers in Tel Aviv. After two originals they turn to themes by Coltrane, Ellington, Abdullah Ibrahim, Ornette Coleman, Milt Jackson and Stevie Wonder. As the title says, the third voice is the room itself, the wood-panelled Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, whose resonance shapes every phrase.

The idea came from Manfred Eicher. During the Lugano session for Yonathan Avishai's trio album Joys and Solitudes in February 2018, he remarked that Cohen "should play this room". The two had shared some thirty years of music by then. They attended the same junior high school, and Yonathan had played on Cohen's quartet albums Into The Silence and Cross My Palm With Silver, both recorded at Studios La Buissonne. The duo met in Lugano in September 2018, with Stefano Amerio as engineer and Eicher producing. According to Avishai, almost everything was a first take.

Each player brought one tune, Cohen's The Opening and Avishai's Two Lines, and these were recorded first. Coltrane's Crescent gets a slow, spacious reading. Throughout, Cohen lets the middle and low registers of the trumpet glow in the hall. Ornette Coleman's Dee Dee, a tune the pair have played for years, becomes a spirited, playful dialogue. Yonathan arranged Sir Duke almost as a piano solo, with the trumpet floating in only at the end. It is a nod to Don Cherry, who quoted the song on the first Codona album. The record closes with Shir Eres, a lullaby by the Israeli songwriter Sasha Argov.

John Fordham, reviewing it for Jazzwise, called it "a quietly intimate dialogue" in which "almost everything in it glows". In the Financial Times, Mike Hobart noted that duets leave no room to hide, "but on this recording, not a note is out of place". He singled out Dee Dee as the highlight. Barry Witherden in Jazz Journal heard a puckish workout in the Coleman piece and found Shir Eres a beguiling closer.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2641, first released on 6 September 2019.