Avishai Cohen trio takes a walk on classical side

Bassist Avishai Cohen’s work with Chick Corea’s Origin ensemble in the late ‘90s immediately identified him as an important young musician. His own recordings, starting with “Adama” in 1997, further underscored the full breadth of his musical interests and talents.

In Monday’s opening set of a two-night engagement at the Jazz Bakery, Cohen appeared with his bandmates, primarily in support of his recently released album, “At Home.” Although he didn’t say so specifically, the title would seem to reflect his recent return to Israel, where he was born in 1970, after spending more than a decade in New York. And the music, as it emerged in his Bakery performance, seemed more detached from jazz than any of his previous outings.

Cohen, pianist Sam Bar-sheshet and drummer Mark Guiliana were clearly in sync, interacting with technical precision reaching across the written and improvised portions of music that often seemed to spring from classical rather than jazz roots.

A virtuosic player, Cohen enhanced his string lines with hand slaps on the body of his bass. But there was not a single number in the set that revealed the sort of passionate, musically probing playing present in his earlier recordings, as well as in his work with Corea. Bar-sheshet and Guiliana were busy players -- often too busy. Bar-sheshet’s long, scale-based lines tended to generate incendiary energy rather than swing. Guiliana’s drumming can best be described as hyperactive rather than propulsive. Their most over-the-top displays of musical pyrotechnics were the passages that generated the most response from an enthusiastic crowd.