Avishai Cohen Trio

Kibbutz Kabri, St Louis, and a Jaco Pastorius record

Cohen was born on 20 April 1970 in Kibbutz Kabri, in northern Israel, and started on piano at nine. The instrument that stuck arrived at fourteen, during a spell living in St Louis, Missouri, when a music teacher put on Jaco Pastorius. He moved to bass guitar and did not go back. Returning to Israel, he studied acoustic bass at the Music and Arts Academy in Jerusalem, then spent two years in an army band.

At 22 he left for New York. While studying at the New School he joined pianist Danilo Pérez's trio and played on PanaMonk, a record that set Latin rhythm against jazz standards and gave him an early calling card in a city full of bassists. The material he has written since pulls on Middle Eastern, eastern European and African-American idioms at once, and he regularly sings in Ladino, the Judaeo-Spanish of his mother's Sephardic family — a habit that separates his bands from almost every other piano trio working the same circuit.

Six years with Corea, then a label of his own

Between 1996 and 2002 Cohen worked closely with Chick Corea, first as a founding member of the Origin sextet and later in Corea's New Trio, roughly six years inside one of the most scrutinised bands in jazz. Reviewers writing about his new album still describe Corea as the mentor who put him on an international stage, and Cohen has not tried to play that down.

In 2002 he founded Razdaz Recordz to release his own work on his own terms, and has used it alongside the French label naïve ever since. The two strands of his output — small-group records he controls end to end, and larger projects with outside backing — have run in parallel for more than twenty years.

The work that fixed the sound

The orchestral strand produced Two Roses in 2021, recorded with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, which rescored his own compositions for a full ensemble without handing the bass a supporting role. The trio strand produced Brightlight in October 2024 on naïve, which became the touring book for the next two years: a show at Ronnie Scott's in April 2025 drew most of its material from it, including Roni's Swing, The Ever and Ever Evolving Etude and the title track.

The recognition has been steady rather than sudden. Cohen took the Echo Jazz award for international bass instrumentalist in 2013, and on 30 June 2023 the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal gave him its Miles Davis Award, presented by festival co-founder André Ménard. Tunes such as Seven Seas, Shifting Sands, Two Roses and When I'm Falling have stayed in the live book across several line-up changes, which is one way of measuring which compositions actually work on a stand.

Eternal Child

Eternal Child came out worldwide on 29 May 2026 on naïve and Believe, ten tracks running a little under 53 minutes. Cohen calls it his most jazz-oriented record, and the clearest signal of that is the title: Eternal Child is not his composition but Corea's, played here as a tribute to a man who died in 2021. The sleeve carries a photograph of Cohen himself at about four or five, picked after he rediscovered it and recognised something in his own eyes that had not gone anywhere. His line on it was that remaining an eternal child is the lot of many artists, and that those are the lucky ones.

The rest of the record is almost entirely personal. Simchover is named for his pianist, Sliv El for his drummer; other pieces point at his partner and at his audience in Japan. Jeff Ballard plays drums on four tracks — Mr Good Sir, Humbly Yours, Eternal Child and Sliv El — with Eviatar Slivnik on the remaining six. Cohen summed the album up as something that reflects all his musical endeavours and brings him to now.

Critical response has been warm and fairly consistent about why. Alex Dutilh, who interviewed Cohen about the record for Open Jazz on 3 July 2026, described the ten pieces as bathed in sun-drenched jazz and built on Cohen's two unbreakable fundamentals, groove and melody. Marek Dusza, writing in the Polish magazine Audio, called him an improviser who attracts large audiences, which is an unusual thing to be able to say about a double bassist leading a piano trio.

A trio rebuilt twice in two years

The line-up has turned over fast. At Ronnie Scott's in August 2022 the band was Cohen with Elchin Shirinov on piano and Roni Kaspi, then 22, on drums. By April 2025 Shirinov and then Guy Moskovich had gone and the pianist was Itay Simhovich, aged 20, still with Kaspi behind him; a reviewer at that run called Simhovich a startling new talent and noted how he framed Cohen's bass lines so that the bass became the lead instrument, before cutting loose into runs of his own.

The current trio is Cohen on bass and vocals, Simhovich, now 22, on piano, and Slivnik, 30, on drums. The Belgian promoter presenting the album's premiere there describes both as players whose roots run through Miles Davis, the Jazz Messengers and the Bill Evans and Ahmad Jamal trios, which matches what the record sounds like. Hiring young and giving them room has become the pattern rather than the exception — Kaspi earned her own standing ovation for a closing solo at the EFG London Jazz Festival on 19 November 2021, at a concert that drew three standing ovations and two encores.

Autumn 2026

The current European run opened on 13 October 2026 at L'Onde in Vélizy-Villacoublay, followed by La Briqueterie in Schiltigheim on 14 October and the Théâtre Lino Ventura in Nice on 16 October. Berlin's Zig Zag Hall takes the trio on 22 October. The Stadsschouwburg in Antwerp on 30 October is billed as the live premiere of Eternal Child and the only Belgian date of the run.

Germany gets two more: the Erholungshaus in Leverkusen on 3 November, and the BASF Feierabendhaus in Ludwigshafen on 10 December as part of Enjoy Jazz, a seated 8pm show with tickets from €40 and €43 on the door. The calendar already runs into next spring, with the Théâtre Casino Barrière in Deauville on 18 April 2027. The venues are mostly theatres and concert halls rather than clubs, which suits a band that has spent a decade pushing quiet passages as hard as loud ones.