Josh Cohen

Josh Cohen (b. 1984, Auckland, New Zealand) is a Berlin-based Australian pianist whose music begins and ends in improvisation. Cohen’s playing is driven by instinct — by texture, abstraction, repetition and ideas that evolve slowly enough to lose their edges. For Cohen, nothing is ever entirely fixed. A fragment may surface, disappear and return later in another form; one piece can dissolve into the next — sound shaped in the moment and followed wherever it leads. That instinct runs through everything he creates, from Weird Time Signature to the long-form improvisations of Livestreams from Clifton Hill and Lagrasse Organ Jam. It also sits at the heart of his reimaginings of Radiohead, which have led to two band-approved songbooks published by Faber Music and featuring artwork by Stanley Donwood. Cohen has amassed over 20 million YouTube views and is represented on Faber Music’s Faber Alt. roster. In Cohen’s hands, improvisation becomes the structure itself: familiar songs, musical fragments and stretches of pure invention surface, recede and bleed into one another. There is something deeply meditative in the experience — Cohen and audience uncover the music together, each note revealing itself only in the instant he plays it. Freedom without looseness, improvisation without shapelessness and surprise that somehow feels inevitable once you hear it.