Cohen’s Adventurous Style Reaches Out, and Connects

Bassist Avishai Cohen is one of the early arrivals in a generation of jazz players whose musical visions reach beyond the familiar American jazz arena. On Saturday night at the Baked Potato Hollywood, he offered a too-brief glance at the potential within that global perspective.

Working with the same sextet present on his current album, “Devotion” (Stretch Records), Cohen played a set that moved from straight-ahead mainstream to mixtures of jazz with Middle Eastern timbres and rhythms. And, although he is a talented and fluent bassist, his most visible skill, in this performance, was his capacity to generate--via his writing and his bandleading--music that managed to be edgy and adventurous without losing its capacity to communicate.

Some of the more intriguing numbers were those that called for guitarist Amos Hoffman--a Cohen associate since their youthful days in Israel--to switch to the oud, a lute-like instrument intrinsically associated with Middle Eastern music. But Cohen was equally compelling with his “Bass Suite #3, Part 2,” a bass showcase performed with the accompaniment of trombonist Steve Davis, saxophonist Jimmy Greene and drummer Jeff Ballard. Only on the more mainstream items did the sextet fall back into the somewhat less intriguing guise of hard-bop predictability.

Even here, however, the solo talent in the Cohen band was high enough to sustain interest. Greene, in particular, offered some remarkably fluid soloing; Davis (an associate with Cohen in Chick Corea’s Origin ensemble) is a crisp, always inventive bopper, and pianist Jason Lindner’s soloing firmly identified him as a member of a recently arriving, rapidly growing cadre of talented young jazz pianists.

But Cohen’s set would have benefited from a greater emphasis on the kind of jazz globalism present on his current album. As international barriers lose their significance, the jazz world view he expresses is a clear representation of a fascinating future.