Following 2020's psychedelic funk- and fusion-leaning
Big Vicious, trumpeter
Avishai Cohen returns to his introspective acoustic quartet work with 2022's meditative
Naked Truth. Once again recorded in France with
ECM founder
Manfred Eicher,
Naked Truth features
Cohen's quartet with
Yonathan Avishai,
Barak Mori, and
Ziv Ravitz. This is a similar, if different lineup of the groups
Cohen used on his previous
ECM albums like 2016's
Into the Silence and 2017's
Cross My Palm with Silver with the one through-line being the presence of pianist
Avishai. In a sense,
Naked Truth is a continuation of the pair's collaborative 2019 duo album
Playing the Room. However, rather than composing songs for the album,
Cohen and his group met in the studio and largely improvised each track in one long session, allowing themselves to react in the moment and build each performance organically. Consequently, there are no individualized song titles and each track feels as if it connects to the next, resulting in a kind of unplanned suite. The only exception to this is the album-closing "Departure," named after a poem by Israeli writer Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky that
Cohen recites to ruminative piano accompaniment. The result is a deeply impressionistic recording that finds
Cohen leading his group with a sustained lyricism that evokes
Miles Davis' classic soundtrack to French director Louis Malle's 1958 film Ascenseur pour l'échafaud. That album was also fully improvised from chordal sketches, with
Davis and his band playing to a rough cut of the film for inspiration. While
Cohen did not have a film to draw from, he nonetheless conjures a deeply cinematic atmosphere. These are dusky ballads, marked by
Cohen's often muted, noir-ish horn lines. ~ Matt Collar