Note up front: this is the bassist. A second, unrelated Israeli jazz musician also named Avishai Cohen plays trumpet and leads Big Vicious and Third World Love; he is profiled separately on JazzProfiles.com. Different person, different instrument, no shared discography.

Cohen grew up on Kibbutz Kabri in northern Israel, in a family with Sephardic, Greek-Jewish, and Polish-Jewish roots. He started on piano at nine, picked up electric bass at fourteen after hearing Jaco Pastorius, and went on to study acoustic bass at the Rubin Academy (Music and Arts Academy) in Jerusalem. After his army service, which included time in a military band, he moved to New York at twenty-two. The early years there were unglamorous: playing bass on the street, working construction, and studying at The New School in Greenwich Village.

The break came fast once it came. Cohen joined pianist Danilo Pérez's trio, and in 1996 he became a founding member of Chick Corea's Origin sextet, staying on the following year into Corea's New Trio. Six years alongside one of jazz piano's most towering figures gave a twentysomething bassist from a northern Israeli kibbutz a stage most players wait a career for.

He struck out as a leader while still working with Corea. Four albums for Bill Laswell's Stretch Records between 1998 and 2001 — Adama, Devotion, Colors, Unity — established him as a bandleader with a sound of his own: jazz built on Middle Eastern, Andalusian, and Ladino foundations rather than borrowed from them. In 2002 he founded his own label, Razdaz Recordz, giving him control over how that sound reached listeners. A run on Sunnyside followed (Lyla, At Home, Continuo), then a stretch on Blue Note that included Aurora (2009) and Seven Seas (2011) — the same period in which Cohen's touring trio, featuring a teenage pianist named Shai Maestro alongside drummer Mark Guiliana, became one of the most talked-about bands in contemporary jazz. Maestro's own career, well documented elsewhere on this site, effectively started in Cohen's band.

1970 (2017, Sony Music), named for his birth year, is generally considered the most accessible entry point into his catalog: song-forward rather than trio-abstract, with Cohen singing over his own bass lines in Ladino and Hebrew as much as playing under someone else's melody. It's a fuller picture of the vocalist and songwriter side of his work than the earlier straight-ahead trio records show.

Cohen doesn't stay in one lane. Gadu, his rock-inflected project with drummer Mark Guiliana, pushes the double bass into electric, backbeat-driven territory far from the acoustic trio format that built his reputation. Since 2016, "An Evening with Avishai Cohen" has taken the opposite direction, pairing him with more than two dozen symphony orchestras worldwide, including the Gothenburg Symphony and the BBC Concert Orchestra — a classical-adjacent arm of his output formalized on 2021's Two Roses, recorded with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra for his new label home, Naïve.

In 2023, the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal gave Cohen its Miles Davis Award, presented to a small number of major jazz artists each year for a full body of work. He is the kind of bassist other bassists point to: Bass Player magazine named him one of the 100 most influential bass players of the 20th century, and DownBeat has called him "a jazz visionary of global proportions." Recent leader albums on Naïve and Razdaz — Shifting Sands (2022) and Brightlight (2024) among them — show no sign of him slowing that output down.

Cohen's foundational influence is Jaco Pastorius, the electric bassist whose sound pulled him toward the instrument at fourteen. His formative professional years under Chick Corea left an unmistakable mark on his harmonic vocabulary and his comfort moving between composed structure and open improvisation. But the sound that's fully his own comes from elsewhere: Ladino songs learned from his mother, Andalusian and broader Mediterranean phrasing, and a willingness to sing — often in Ladino, sometimes in Hebrew or English — over his own bass playing rather than treating the bass purely as accompaniment. The New York Times once described his 2006 album Continuo as combining "heavy Middle Eastern groove with a delicate, almost New Age lyricism," a fair description of the tension that runs through most of his catalog: rhythmically insistent, melodically searching, never quite settling into a single tradition.