Sixteen years ago, the former Chick Corea bassist Avishai Cohen first played in London as a composer/leader to just a handful of the curious. Today, the Israeli-American is rightly famous for a unique fusion of Judeo-Spanish folk songs, jazz and classical music, the power of which he revealed at the Barbican in the latest of his collaborations with some of the world’s classical orchestras.
After conductor Bastien Still and the BBC Concert Orchestra’s overture of radiant Middle Eastern folk themes and dancing bassoon hooks, Cohen dedicated the show to his late friend and visionary, London promoter John Ellson. Then Cohen, pianist Omri Mor, percussionist Itamar Doari and the orchestra played the leader’s Song for My Brother, a guilessly romantic theme transformed by a punchy bass and piano vamp and the remarkable Doari’s coupling of a jazzy cymbal beat to his left hand’s thunder on the cajón box drum. The first big cheers were sparked by a brass-roaring, Latin-tinged interpretation of Ukrainian-Israeli composer Mordechai Zeira’s Two Roses. Later, Cohen’s bass virtuosity rekindled the jazz ballad A Child Is Born, and Mor brought the house down with a piano solo on the spirited Arab Medley that had the metallic, chordal clang of a dulcimer and the percussive speed of a drum break.
The orchestra animatedly riffed behind Cohen’s flying bass runs and clattering drumming on the instrument’s woodwork on Alon Basela, and the encores shuffled folksong simplicity, orchestral power, pop seductiveness and jazz ingenuity as the star danced with his bass within reach of the cheering, bopping crowd.
