He had come to make up for a mistake. Once, the man told me, laughing, he bought a ticket for Avishai Cohen. He sat through the whole concert waiting. Waiting for the man on stage to put down his trumpet and pick up a double bass. It never happened. He had gone to see the other Avishai Cohen, the trumpeter. Same name, same country, different instrument.
This time he had the right one. He could laugh about it. So could we.
In front of me sat two women who had clearly dressed for the occasion. Hair done. The best clothes out of the wardrobe. One of them wore earrings shaped like Halloween pumpkins. Gold, with a ruby. It was the night before Halloween.
Jazz lovers, season-ticket holders who had come to be surprised, a man correcting an old error. A good crowd. They had style.
The bunker
The building did not expect them.
Antwerp’s Stadsschouwburg was born from a fire. In 1958 a blaze in the cellar of the old Bourla theatre made the city decide it needed something new. Construction started in 1968. It took twelve years. When it opened in 1980, the people of Antwerp gave it a name that stuck: the bunker.
Artists found it too big. The hall seated 800. Then, in 1998, the roof came off and the capacity went to 2,060, with a stage made for musicals. The largest theatre with a fly tower in Flanders.
In 2022 the city decided to tear it down. Concrete rot. It still stands, waiting.
A building made too big for actors, then made bigger for spectacle, now condemned. And on its stage: a double bass, a grand piano, a drum kit.
The eternal child, playing in a dying house.
First night, only night
Cohen barely spoke. He let the music do the work.
Three times he took the microphone. The first time to tell us this was the opening night of the tour, and the only Belgian date. Then, almost in the same breath: but he is always on tour.
He is not wrong. In May I heard this same music in Liège, at Jazz à Liège. Back then it was still unreleased, and it came with five musicians: trombone, saxophone, piano, drums, bass. Since then Eternal Child has come out, the trio album Cohen calls his most “jazz” record so far.
Now the horns are gone. Five became three.
What fills the space they leave? Room. And someone has to know what to do with room.
Ten pieces in the set. Six from Eternal Child. And not the six I heard in Liège. There the horns played “El Bazita,” “My Brues,” “Tonight,” “Lookie.” Here the trio played the other half of the record: “Humbly Yours,” “Sliv El,” “Closure,” and the title track.
“Eternal Child,” second in the set. The only song on the album Cohen did not write. Chick Corea did, the man who took a young Israeli bassist off a demo tape and onto the world’s stages. In Liège it was missing. Here it came early, as if he wanted the debt paid first.
Around the new music, the old. “Nu Nu” to open. “Ballad for an Unborn.” “Hitragut.” And “Chutzpan,” from Gently Disturbed, the 2008 trio record made at Nilento in Sweden. Remember that studio. It comes back.
And then there was the drummer. Here I have to correct myself.
I was wrong about the drummer
In Liège I called Eviatar Slivnik a rhythmic beast. A technical powerhouse. I compared him with Roni Kaspi, who sat behind the kit before him, and wrote that she played more musically. I repeated it in my review of the album.
I have to take it back.
Slivnik has been with Cohen since the summer of 2024, first in the quintet. In the trio for about a year now. In that year something has happened. He no longer fills the space. He shapes it. The drums have become a dynamic instrument: loud when the music asks for it, almost nothing when the others need room. And because he gives them room, they play better.
On the album, four pieces have Jeff Ballard behind the kit: “Mr Good Sir,” “Humbly Yours,” “Eternal Child,” “Sliv El.” On Friday Slivnik played all four. Alone. Nobody missed anyone.
That is exactly what Kaspi did. Slivnik carries her tradition forward: the drummer as a musician, not as a machine.
His solo in “Simchover,” the piece that closed the set, was still spectacular. I had heard it in Brussels and in Liège. But it was the quiet that convinced me.
He no longer fills the space. He shapes it.
The mist
He hardly spoke all night. The second time he took the microphone, he gave something away.
Unbiblical, he said. Fourteen pieces. Leonard Cohen.
He came back for the encore. Then he sang. Not a text from the late notebooks the project is said to be built on. A poem from 1961. As the Mist Leaves No Scar, from The Spice-Box of Earth, the book that made a young Montrealer a poet people bought.
The bass came first. Singing, almost. Sliding up to each note instead of landing on it.
Then the piano, in drops. Like rain starting on a window. Slivnik barely touched the drums.
All three of them there for one reason: to carry the voice.
And the voice. You would know it among thousands. Close your eyes, hold your breath. The warmth of 1970, his most open record, the one where the bassist became a singer of songs.
Nobody expected it. He simply dropped it in our laps. A gift, unwrapped in front of us.
The hall went very quiet.
This was not in any press release. The official story, told to The Jerusalem Post last week, is neater. September 2023, a flight from New York to Los Angeles. Cohen opens The Flame, the collection of Leonard Cohen’s last poems, published two years after his death. The next day he writes “Undertow.” Thirteen more follow in two weeks. All of it from The Flame, the paper says.
Then why a poem from 1961?
Maybe the project was always bigger than the press release. The young Leonard Cohen writes about desire. The old Leonard Cohen writes about what is left of it. Put them side by side and you no longer have a tribute. You have one life, read from both ends.
That is my reading, not his. He did not explain. He rarely does.
You have one life, read from both ends.
Hiding in plain sight
Here I owe the reader a confession.
In October 2024 I reviewed Brightlight. I called its opener, “Courage,” the essence of the album.
I was right about the energy. I was wrong about what I was hearing.
A month later Cohen told Télérama that he had used that very composition, the year before, to set a Leonard Cohen text: “I Pray for Courage,” from The Flame. “Courage,” he explained, is simply its instrumental version.
So the project was already on a record. Without words. I praised it without knowing it.
And he has been singing it for years. In Pau in November 2023. In Leverkusen in 2024. In Brussels in March 2025, where he told the audience he had arranged sixteen Leonard Cohen songs, and sang one. I was there. I wrote it down. I did not connect it.
Sixteen then. Fourteen now.
The title, too, comes from Leonard Cohen. “Unbiblical” appears in The Flame, in lines about a man whose mistake was to spare the snake. Genesis, turned upside down. It suits them both: two Cohens, neither of them pious, both of them praying anyway.
Unbiblical premieres in Tel Aviv on 13 January. Paris and Toulouse follow in February. On Friday, in a condemned theatre in Antwerp, we heard a piece of it first.
They come, they fly
The third time Cohen spoke, he introduced his band. And he could not hide his pride.
His pianist, he said, has a project of his own. According to Cohen’s European press office, the album is finished and due in January. It is almost certainly The Raft, by Zafio, the piano trio Simhovich formed with two friends from his teenage years at the Thelma Yellin arts school. Produced by Shai Maestro. Recorded at Nilento in Sweden, the studio where Cohen made Brightlight.
Shai Maestro, once the young pianist in Cohen’s own trio. Now producing the next one.
His drummer, Cohen added, is working on something of his own too. He left it there.
This is how Cohen works. He has a nose for talent like few others. He often finds them when they are barely twenty. He takes them on the road. He makes a record or two with them. Then they fly. Shai Maestro. Nitai Hershkovits. Roni Kaspi, who now releases her own music as singer, producer and drummer. Guy Moskovich. And now Simhovich and Slivnik.
Most of them Israeli, not all: the Azerbaijani pianist Elchin Shirinov passed through as well. Together they form a breeding ground for a whole generation of jazz musicians.
It works because Cohen also has roots. On Eternal Child, Jeff Ballard, his companion from the New York years, plays next to two young musicians. The old core holds the new blood. That is what makes the renewal possible.
In March 2025, in Brussels, Simhovich celebrated his twenty-first birthday on stage with Cohen. Nineteen months later he has his own record coming out.
The eternal child does not only stay young himself. He keeps making young musicians grow up.
What remains
The encore went on with “Avre Tu Puerta Cerrada.” Open your closed door. An old Ladino song: Judeo-Spanish, the language Cohen inherited from his mother’s side. At the end of a jazz concert, a door to Sephardic memory swung open. In all the times I have heard him, I had never heard him sing it. Nobody in the hall needed a translation.
The very last piece was called “Remembering.”
When wind and hawk encounter, Leonard Cohen asked in 1961, what remains to keep?
On Friday, the music remained. A man who finally saw the right Avishai Cohen. Two women with gold in their ears. A drummer who proved me wrong. A poem nobody expected. A closed door, opened.
And a building that may not stand much longer, full for one night.
So here is my question for you. How much of an album that does not exist yet can you hear on a concert stage, if you know where to listen?
The verdict
★★★★Half of a new album, a drummer who has grown, and a Leonard Cohen poem nobody saw coming. Three musicians fill a bunker.
