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Jazzarium

3 Cohens
Braid
Anzic Records

Like a Tel Aviv Marsalis family, the Cohen siblings grew up in literal and musical conversation about jazz. In Braid, their second album together, we hear the continuation of that conversation in 10 delightful tracks that highlight their individual talents but, even more impressively, showcase their superb ensemble interplay, harmony, and complementary tones. Braid is a nice metaphor, of course -- challah, textile, and all that -- but it's not just an excuse for pretty cover art here, it's a true description of the album's overall aural impression.

In original tunes by tenor saxophonist Anat Cohen, trumpeter Avishai Cohen, and soprano saxophonist Yuval Cohen, plus a wonderfully whimsical take on Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke's "It Could Happen to You," the players are joined by the dynamic and enriching rhythm section of Aaron Goldberg on piano, Omer Avital on bass, and Eric Harland on drums.

The Cohens all studied at the same conservatory in Israel and each attended Berklee in Boston before moving to New York. Yuval now lives in Israel; Anat and Avishai are in New York. Braid encompasses Middle Eastern, Latin, bop, and California vibes in work that is at once imaginative and harmonically appealing from the first listen. On subsequent hearings, the subtlety of composition and the mellifluousness of individual and ensemble tone only become more apparent. So do the understated but integral contributions of Harland's drumming, which features little paprika splashes of tom, snare, and cymbal at key moments. And as with so many fine bass players, Avital's work is so key to the compositional architecture that you take it for granted until, say, a dazzling little downward scamper in "Shoutin' Low." Goldberg provides confident Latin sway to numbers like "Beaches" and "U-Valley" and sizzles with scalar high jinks before Harland's tom-dominant solo triumph in a marvelously propelled sprinting tune by Yuval called "Freedom."

"Navad (The Wanderer)" is a chatty, halucinatory outing over a 6/8 African beat. Its last third, I suspect, echoes what dinner conversation must have been like at the Cohen household when they were growing up -- a lot of sympathy, interruption, harmony, imagination, and love. "Gigi et Amelie" is a quiet interlude featuring muted trumpet that brings to mind a misty early spring morning in Paris with two distant silhouettes huddled in intimate conversation. "Elegy for Eliku" is a sweet, sorrowful ballad dedicated to the memory of the Cohens' uncle (as is the album). Yuval's extended soprano lines, especially, are reed-cries that make you wish you'd met the guy who elicits such eloquent remembrance and mourning.

"Lies and Gossip" is an extended angry complaint against some mysterious injustice. I don't know what triggered Avishai to write this number, but whatever it was must have been nasty and memorable. "It Could Happen to You" is another amusingly and technically inspired conversational track that one imagines was preceded by years of improvisation and variations among the sibs, maybe in an echoey laundry room. After starting off like a Billy Strayhorn-arranged high-holiday service, "Tfila (Prayer)" has passages in that chatty vein too, and in general is the swingingest, most convivial slice of reverence you'll hear any time soon. "Shoutin' Low" plays off Dizzy Gillespie's "Groovin' High" with a cool, chromatic insouciance.

Hearing Braid, you can only look forward to the occasional continuation of this family act, even as the Cohens each continue to develop their own individual career strands.

Stacey Kent
Breakfast on the Morning Tram
Blue Note

Appearing on a British radio show, Desert Island Discs, the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, etc.) listed a Stacey Kent track among his. The two met, became friends, and then collaborators.

The four most delightful numbers on this sublime album have lyrics by Ishiguro and music by Kent's husband, the saxophonist Jim Tomlinson, who also arranged and produced.

Kent long emphasized in her repertoire the American songbook. She hasn't abandoned it in this, her first album for Blue Note -- she's got, for instance, a sassy version of "Hard-Hearted Hannah," about "the Vamp of Savannah," a lady almost nasty enough to be attorney general. But Kent interweaves with the originals and such Yankee fare a couple chansons by Serge Gainsbourg and a samba from the French film A Man and a Woman. It's as though her repertoire has come to reflect the history of the singer herself -- she was born in New York, studied in Paris, and now resides in London.

Christopher Loudon, in JazzTimes, gets it just right when he describes her style as suggesting "the ice-cool creaminess of Jo Staford blended with the butterscotch-warm appeal of Doris Day." She also has an occasional observational PoMo babe-from-another-planet moment a la Suzanne Vega. Kent always sounds as though she's in the midst of a rather sophisticated movie plot, turning aside to confide in us. It's very alluring.

First, to the wonderfully witty Ishiguro/Tomlinson tunes:

"The Ice Hotel" describes a getaway needed to either cool overheated lovers or thaw them slowly and safely -- perhaps some of both. "I Wish I Could Go Traveling Again" commends even inconvenient trips as a tonic for the mind and heart. The title song, "Breakfast on the Morning Tram," is a hallucinogenic gourmet buffet to alleve the blues on such a trip. Whether "Never Let Me Go" was written as an addendum to Ishiguro's novel of the same name, it's an unforgettably pining ballad, featuring a sensitive, sculpted solo by pianist Graham Harvey. "So Romantic" amusingly explores the thin line between melancholy posing and just plain melancholy.

Kent tests herself in taking on two numbers so overplayed that we're all tired of them to the point of nausea -- Stevie Nicks's "Landslide" and the old Satchmo standard "What a Wonderful World." But with her incisive, gentle takes, they revive and, impossibly, we fall for them all over again.

Tomlinson's arrangements mirror his wife's style in being both refined and relaxed. So does his playing, along with that of Harvey, John Parricelli on guitar (particularly splendid on "Landslide"), Dave Chamberlain on bass (I love his tumble into the first "Landslide" chorus), and Matt Skelton on drums and percussion (he gives the Gainsbourg songs a fine lilt).

Long may Kent continue to globalize her repertoire and reinvent the standards. Ishiguro and the rest of us are lucky to have her brightening our little islands.