The name David Bennett Cohen might not ring a bell to many of you but if you read further on you have to admit that this man is truly one of the superstars from the late sixties, early seventies. David Cohen, as he was credited at that time, was one of the founding members of the psychedelic country rock outfit “Country Joe & The Fish”.  He contributed on those legendary albums like “Electric Music for the Mind and Body” and “Together” and was there with the band at the time they became very popular with their “I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag”.  After his departure from the band the man recorded with legendary names like Mick Taylor, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Winter, Michael Bloomfield, The Blues Project, Elvin Bishop, Tim Hardin and tons of others and even became a popular music teacher, who put out a series of instructional video’s and DVD’s sharing his knowledge with the rest of the community.

Today, he’s still doing the thing he loves most.  Making music & playing boogie-woogie piano.  Cookin’ with Cohen brings us a mix of jazz & blues tunes of which many of them are instrumentals.   Classic covers like the “When the saint’s go marching in” are featured on this album, but it is of course one of those original David Bennett Cohen tunes that brings joy to the album.  Take for instance “Crawfish Royale”, the latter is a great instrumental blues tune with a touch of Latin percussion once in a while.  New Orleans is never far away in this Cajun style mix of blues and jazz. “Funky Peaches” is a nice jazz rock inspired tune that keeps hanging for a long time and “The cool Fool” has something mysterious around it. It sounds familiar and then again it doesn’t. While all those tunes are situated in the blues/jazz atmosphere and many of them are provided with great Latin percussion  (think Santana), David Cohen is surely capable of totally different things.  Opening track “Cookin’ with Cohen” throws in a classic boogie-woogie tune with a beat driven piano on the lead.  “We all want a peace in our time” follows the same path but isn’t an instrumental.  Closing track on the album “Blues for a summer’s dream” is once more totally different and gives us a taste of David Bennett Cohen the solo piano performer.

When listening to this album one can hardly make any remarks on this person or his music.  Production wise this album is almost flawless and musically it’s very entertaining. However it is a mixed bag of styles and that’s often hard to sell to your fans and audience. For myself I prefer the blues tunes I mentioned before, those who remind me of Santana, however others might go for his more jazzy tunes!  But whatever you choose from this album, one thing is for sure this man breaths music.

Mr. Blue Boogie.

Album Kindly submitted by Redwood Entertainment.