Disambiguation first: this is the trumpeter, born 1978 in Tel Aviv. A different, unrelated Israeli jazz musician also named Avishai Cohen plays double bass and was a longtime member of Chick Corea's bands; he is profiled separately on JazzProfiles.com. The two share nothing beyond a name and a nationality — the confusion is common enough that this trumpeter named his own 2003 debut album The Trumpet Player, partly just to make the distinction obvious on a record shelf.

He grew up in a musical family in Tel Aviv: sister Anat plays clarinet and tenor saxophone, brother Yuval plays soprano saxophone, and all three eventually recorded and toured together as the 3 Cohens. Avishai started on trumpet at eight, joined the Rimon School Big Band at ten, and by his teens was touring with the Israel Philharmonic under conductors including Zubin Mehta, Kurt Masur, and Kent Nagano — a serious orchestral pedigree for a player who'd go on to build his career almost entirely in small-group jazz. A scholarship took him to Berklee College of Music in Boston; DownBeat's Critics Poll voted him a Rising Star trumpeter four years running while he was there. In 1997 he took third place at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Trumpet Competition, a serious marker of arrival for a player still in his late teens.

He moved to New York and came up through Smalls Jazz Club, developing his sound alongside pianist Jason Lindner and bassist Omer Avital. Several working bands came out of that period and have stayed with him since: Third World Love, with Avital, pianist Yonatan Avishai, and drummer Daniel Freedman; and Triveni, his trio with Avital and drummer Nasheet Waits. He also spent six years as a member of the SFJAZZ Collective, the rotating all-star repertory band built around new arrangements of jazz and popular-music repertoire.

Cohen's discography before ECM includes The Trumpet Player (2003, Fresh Sound) and a run of albums with Third World Love and Triveni through the 2000s and into the 2010s. Everything changed in scope, if not in ambition, when ECM producer Manfred Eicher heard him on saxophonist Mark Turner's 2014 album Lathe of Heaven and signed him. Into the Silence (2016) was his ECM debut, dedicated to the memory of his father and built around an expansive, spare compositional language for quartet, augmented by tenor saxophone on select pieces; The New York Times called it "quietly ravishing." Cross My Palm with Silver (2017) kept the same core group, with bassist Barak Mori replacing Eric Revis. Playing the Room (2019) paired him in duo with pianist Yonatan Avishai. Naked Truth (2022) is a fully improvised eight-part suite recorded in the south of France; The Guardian called it "Cohen's quietest but maybe boldest adventure."

Running alongside the quieter ECM records is Big Vicious, the other half of his musical personality entirely. Debuted in 2019 with guitarists Uzi Ramirez and Yonatan Albalak and drummers Aviv Cohen and Ziv Ravitz, the band runs Cohen's trumpet through electronics over rock and electronic grooves — psychedelic fusion rather than chamber jazz. The self-titled Big Vicious album came out on ECM in March 2020.

His most recent studio album, Ashes to Gold (released October 11, 2024, on ECM, recorded November 2023 at Studios La Buissonne in the south of France), is his sixth ECM release and by far his most personal: a five-part suite largely written in the week following the October 7, 2023 attack, with his working quartet of pianist Yonathan Avishai, bassist Barak Mori, and drummer Ziv Ravitz, plus Cohen himself on flute in addition to trumpet. In July 2025 he brought a live, orchestral version of the piece — retitled in performance as "Ashes to Gold" / "From Ashes to Gold" — to the Israel Festival in Jerusalem, where his quartet joined the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra in a concerto arrangement for roughly 60 musicians, performed outdoors near the Jerusalem Theater. He's described the suite's title through the lens of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with gold — taking the broken and making something new and valuable from the pieces, rather than hiding the break.

Cohen cites Miles Davis as a defining influence, and it shows less in direct imitation than in a shared instinct for space, dynamics, and restraint — the ECM records in particular favor atmosphere and long compositional arcs over displays of technique. His sound splits cleanly into two registers that rarely overlap on the same record: the spare, composerly lyricism of Into the Silence, Cross My Palm with Silver, and Naked Truth, and the electric, groove-forward psychedelia of Big Vicious, where the trumpet runs through effects and sits inside rock and electronic rhythm sections rather than above them. Ashes to Gold sits closer to the first register but carries more overt emotional weight than his earlier ECM work, written directly out of a specific historical and personal rupture.