Idiomatically conversant with modern and traditional jazz, with classical music, with Brazilian choro, Argentine tango, and an expansive timeline of Afro-Cuban styles, Anat Cohen has established herself as one of the primary voices of her generation on both the tenor saxophone and clarinet since she arrived in New York in 1999.

Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, Cohen grew up with musical siblings; her older brother, Yuval, is himself a saxophonist of note, and her younger brother, Avishai, is one of New York’s busiest trumpeters. She began clarinet studies at 12, and played jazz on clarinet for the first time in her Jaffa conservatory’s Dixieland unit. At 16 she joined the school’s big band, for which she learned the tenor saxophone. That same year, Cohen entered the prestigious “Thelma Yellin” High School For the Arts, where she majored in jazz.

A devotee of Dexter Gordon and John Coltrane, Cohen played tenor saxophone in the Air Force band from 1993-95. She spent the next year accompanying the eminent Israeli writeractor- singer Yossi Banai, who died last year at 75. “Jazz gigs were rare,” Cohen recalls. “Playing with Yossi was a great experience, and we got to travel as much as you can in Israel.” In 1996, Cohen followed her brother, Yuval, to Boston to matriculate at Berklee School of Music. There she met faculty member Phil Wilson, who encouraged her clarinet investigations, such other inspiring teachers as Greg Hopkins, Ed Tomassi, Hal Crook, George Garzone, and Bill Pierce, and an elite international peer group. “

Berklee was crucial for my career,” she says. “Israel is isolated, and I was very closed-minded when I got there. I just wanted to play Coltrane, to play jazz; I didn’t think of world music at all. Berklee gives scholarships to great musicians from all over the world, and it becomes a bit like New York—everybody from all over the place. From meeting so many people who play music from their own country, I realized that when the Real Book says ‘Latin’ on top, it means nothing unless you know exactly that it’s from the northeast of Brazil or the west coast of Colombia. I realized that I want to explore the music of South America and the world. “

For me, the music in Israel with a more Arabic feel is close to the baiao from the Northeast of Brazil. African rhythms are very similar. Immigrants brought South American rhythms to Israel; there are songs in Hebrew that I thought were Israeli that actually are from Venezuela or Brazil. We hear a lot of these songs, but we don’t know necessarily know where they’re from.” During her Berklee years, Cohen visited New York on semester breaks, bee-lining to Smalls to soak up the hybrid of grooves, world music and mainstream jazz that Lindner and Avital—a high school bandmate of her older brother—were then evolving. In Boston, Cohen played klezmer at wedding engagements, with Argentinean pianist Pablo Ablanedo, and Afro-Cuban music with Ecuadorian bassist Alex Alvear and alto saxophonist Miguel Zenon in a group called Mango Blue. Brazilian bassist Leonardo Cioglia called Cohen for Brazilian Popular Music gigs, and she learned the songbooks of Ivan Lins, Milton Nascimento, and Toninho Horta. The group evolved to an instrumental quartet that gigged weekly, and Cohen studied Brazilian percussion to be able to imitate the rhythms. After Cioglia left for New York, jobs with Fernando Brandao, a Brazilian flutist, exposed her to choro, the challenging Brazilian genre that contains classical European elements, Afro-Brazilian rhythms, improvisation and constant counterpoint. Once ensconced in New York, she quickly found work in various Brazilian ensembles, including a gig with the high-octane pop band Brazooca at the Café Wha in Greenwich Village.

“One night there I met Pedro Ramos,” she recalls, referring to the tenor guitarist and cavaquinho player who had recently organized the Choro Ensemble, Cohen’s primary clarinet outlet for the last seven years. “The next day he showed up at my house and gave me songs to learn for a demo record he was doing the following week. We started to play, and it brought me back to being a clarinet player. I fell in love with choro music. Choro uses classical harmonic progressions as well as the classical approach to perfecting technique on the instrument. It has the alegria, the happiness of the samba, the nostalgia, the saudade (longing), the groove, the party part, the improvisation, and the interaction. It has all the elements that I think music should have, and it needs very dedicated musicians to play it, which is why not a lot of people do.”

During these years Cohen has also held the tenor saxophone chair in Sherrie Maricle’s Diva Jazz Orchestra, the top-shelf all-woman big band, with which she has toured the world. “Diva gave me a lot of confidence,” she says. “For one thing, New York was very scary to me, and it was inspiring to see all these women who live and work on a high level as musicians in New York.

“I love ensemble playing and being a sideperson. I had a good start with Dixieland music, and playing in a big band was a good way to feel the tradition—you have to play the style in a unified way. I wanted to play like Coltrane when I got to Berklee, but I realized, ‘Okay, but I’ve missed about 30 years that happened before, so let’s go back.’”

Indeed, Cohen—who also plays with Cioglia in New York Samba Jazz, a modernist quintet led by Brazilian drum master Duduka Da Fonseca, plays with her brothers in the group The Three Cohens, and leads a young quartet with pianist Gilad Hekselman, bassist Eduardo Perez, and drummer Ferenc Nementh—has gone way, way back, and found her own, distinctive voice in the process. In addition to her investigations of early Pan-American strains, she’s played the music of Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet on a regular basis with David Ostwald’s Gully Low Jazz Band since 2004.

“There’s so much history,” she says. “I play Louis Armstrong with David on the same day that I play with the Choro Ensemble; I bring what I just played to the choro, and I make a mix. My influences are not necessarily from clarinet players—although I listened to a lot of Benny Goodman when I was younger. Rather, the styles influence my ideas on clarinet. You have to do the homework and understand the components and feeling of the style. You can’t play in
the bebop style without playing bebop lines. Similarly, you can’t play choro without playing the right articulation, phrasing, and notes.”

After documenting bona fides on her debut CD, Place and Time, which was one of All About Jazz-New York’s “Best Debut Albums of 2005," Cohen references all the flavors that comprise the sum total of her tonal personality on the strikingly original 2007 releases Noir and Poetica. Considered as a pair, they catapult her to the highest ranks of jazz invention, confirming
Hentoff’s remark that Cohen’s “range of musical challenges recalls what Duke Ellington used to tell me about his refusal to limit music to any ‘category.’”

Until recently, Cohen has played primarily tenor saxophone on her own shows, interpolating the occasional clarinet and soprano saxophone number. On Poetica, joined throughout by a jazz quartet (pianist Jason Lindner, bassist Omer Avital, drummer Daniel Freedman) and on four tunes by a string quartet, she plays exclusively clarinet on repertoire drawn from Israel nigunim, Brazilian choro and French cabaret, as well as John Coltrane’s "Lonnie’s Lament," two originals by herself, and an impressionistic piece by bassist Omer Avital, with whom she shares arranging duties. On Noir, she frames sparkling inventions on all her instruments with an unconventionally configured ensemble— three woodwinds, three trumpets, two trombones, three cellos, and a guitar-bass-drums-percussion rhythm section, for which Oded Lev-Ari, a high school classmate, provides fresh, original textures. As Dan Morgenstern writes in the liner notes, the 10-song program “unfolds like a Pan-American film score.”

As Morgenstern observes, whatever Cohen plays, she approaches with deep scholarship and a profound quality of soul. “She never plays to the gallery; even her high notes are not for show, but part of the musical message,” he writes. “There are not many musicians on today’s scene who communicate such a genuine joy in what they do. She loves to make music, and while she is a physically expressive player, her moves, like her music, are a true reflection of what she feels.”

1997 (Berklee-Monterey Quartet)

	Friday Night - September 19, 2008 / 9:30pm
	Night Club / Bill Berry Stage