Friday's episode of All Things Considered contained a musical interlude by Avishai Cohen—specifically, a clip of Elli off of Cohen's 2006 release Continuo. NPR has the interlude in a flash player on their site.
Cohen is an Israeli double-bassist with a great sense of composition—I'm still making my way through them all, but it seems that half of his works are well-assembled examples of traditional jazz, and half of them (particularly the more recent tracks) are moodier with lots of minor key progressions, heavy syncopation, and rich texture. Cohen is a phenomenally good bass player to begin with, but even among players of his caliber, it's rare to find someone who can compose properly voiced tracks that don't endlessly put the bass front-and-center.
I've spent a lot of time with Continuo so far, which is a tremendously good album with lots of rich, flowing tracks like Ani Maamin, Emotional Storm, and the aforementioned Elli—you can listen to clips of both at the Amazon page for the album. They're also posted on Cohen's site but the player wasn't working for me.
I've also poked through Adama and At Home a bit but not enough to really get them yet. Thank god for subscription music services. I'll let you know how the rest of portfolio goes.
P.S. It turns out there are two Israeli jazz artists named Avishai Cohen. The other one is a trumpeter—and yes, I did accidentally listen to part of one of his albums thinking it was the bassist. Good stuff—but horns, not bass.
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