“Many composers no longer make musical structures. Instead they set processes going. A structure is like a piece of furniture, whereas a process is like the weather. In the case of a table, the beginning and the end of the whole and each of its parts are known. In the case of the weather, though we notice changes in it, we have no clear knowledge of its beginning or ending. At a given moment, we are when we are. The now moment”.
(John Cage, The Future of Music)
Perhaps the American composer John Cage did not have the Avishai Cohen Big Vicious Band in mind when he wrote these lines in 1937, but his words perfectly apply to the music we heard from Vaba Lava’s stage.
In front of the President of Estonia and representatives of the Israelian embassy, Avishai’s ensemble produced music that really had an atmospheric quality.
The short pauses between the tunes seemed more like a relic from the past habits of jazz concerts when groups would introduce the next tune with a title, than needed by the music itself as it could have easily stretched in a continuous flow, like in a stream of consciousness.
The leader kicked off the concert with his electronic effects creating a perfect canvas for the other musicians to slowly blend in, and when the right sonic texture was reached, he finally joined them with his trumpet, which functioned as a brush drawing sounds in the air.
It did not matter how the piece started: whether it was electronic raindrops, or the powerful, thundering drumming of Ziv Ravitz and Aviv Cohen, or a stuttering loop emanated by Yonatan Albalak on bass, the music eventually converged to a place where Avishai’s trumpet would play melancholic, lysergic notes trickling from a living wall of sound pervading the entire venue.
While there were images projected in the background, the music almost possessed a tactile, sensual property; it was almost liquid, gurgling as in a caldron. Every now and then bubbles of energy would come to the surface in the form of slow crescendos that would later return to the amalgam they had emerged from.
In fact, it was a kind of cleansing, ritual experience, so much so that when a tip of funk music suddenly burst out, it felt like a memory of the type of music we might have wanted to come to listen to, but that we were learning we can also live without.
The concert ended up with “Teardrop”, a cover of a Massive Attack tune, from the album which was supposed to support a worldwide tour that did not happen due to Covid-19, followed by an encore that started with an extended trumpet solo – one of the few, or the only, classic jazz moments of the evening – preceding one of the highlights of the evening: a trip on a road in the Arizona desert led by Uzi Ramirez and his dissonant guitar.
Overalls, tattoos, mustache, long hair, sunglasses. Good vibes. In Telliskivi – Tallinn’s pulsing creative hub – these outfits and outlooks may go unnoticed due to its predominant hipster scene, but on the stage of Vaba Lava they reflected the level of contamination in jazz today. Music-wise, Avishai Cohen’s Big Vicious, mixing electronics, jazz, ambient music and more, is a natural consequence.
Avishai Cohen “Big Vicious”
April 28th at 18.00, Vaba Lava
Lineup:
Avishai Cohen – trumpet, synthesizer, effects
Uzi Ramirez – guitarist, composer, music lover
Yonatan Albalak – guitar, bass
Aviv Cohen – drums
Ziv Ravitz – percussion, live-sampling
Check out the concert photos here.