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Anat Cohen Rises in Jazz World

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Anat Cohen's clarinet wailed like a woman scorned, dispensing with any need for a vocalist as she played the soulful 1950s torch song “Cry Me A River" with her Anzic Orchestra during a recent jazz club run that saw her perform with four of her bands.

Cohen, who comes from a family of prominent musicians, has come a long away since arriving in the United States in 1996 with a scholarship to study at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. She came shortly after completing her two-year compulsory military service as a tenor saxophonist in the Israeli Air Force Band, playing mostly pop music to entertain the troops.

On tenor saxophone, Cohen has a big sound--she can both growl and play softer and more lyrically--that goes all the way back to pre-bebop Swing Era players. But it's her lovely, fluid clarinet playing that has established her as one of most promising young jazz instrumentalists. This year she was voted Rising Star Clarinet in Downbeat magazine's critics poll and received two awards from the Jazz Journalists Association as Clarinetist of the Year and Up and Coming Musician.

“The clarinet has a range that is very wide and it sounds to me almost human," said Cohen, interviewed at the Greenwich Village town house that doubles as her home and the office of Anzic Records, the label she founded with her high school classmate, arranger-conductor Oded Lev-Ari. “It has the low notes and the high notes, so it's a pretty versatile instrument.

“I've been playing 'Cry Me A River' for a little while now and I can really express my feelings with the clarinet. You can really scream up there or you can be very gentle, very sensual, and you can be kind of mean."

At the recent performance at the Jazz Standard, Cohen performed with her Brazilian and mainstream jazz quartets; the Anzic big band she co-leads with Lev-Ari; and the 3 Cohens--Israel's answer to the Marsalis brothers--in which she's joined by older brother Yuval on saxophones and younger brother Avishai on trumpet.

That gig capped a breakthrough year for the 32-year-old Cohen. This summer, Cohen made her debut at the Newport Jazz Festival and became the first Israeli and the first female horn player to headline at New York's legendary Village Vanguard jazz club.

Cohen, who released her first album as a leader in 2005, came out this year with two critically acclaimed albums on her Anzic label. Each disc showcases different sides of her musical personality. On Noir, she plays tenor, alto and soprano saxophones and clarinet with a big band that includes an unusual three-cello section, mixing Latin American music and jazz standards. The smaller ensemble Poetica, which focuses on her clarinet playing, offers an eclectic global mix of tunes from Israel, France and Brazil as well as several originals and her idol John Coltrane's “Lonnie's Lament," with an innovative arrangement featuring a string quartet.

Cohen began playing clarinet at age 12 in a Dixieland band in an after-school program at a Tel Aviv conservatory. Her teachers in the newly inaugurated jazz program at Israel's Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts encouraged her to focus on the tenor saxophone. But a teacher at Berklee, Phil Wilson, recognized that she had her own voice on the clarinet.

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