Jazz artist Anat Cohen had just flown from her native Tel Aviv and landed in her adopted New York City.
She was preparing a short tour featuring her American jazz and chamber music infused with Brazilian sounds. If she sounds like an international spirit, she is indeed. “New York is home,” she said, “and Tel Aviv is home and Rio de Janeiro is home.”
Cohen, who performs at the Breman Museum on Sunday, Nov. 20, used to say, with joking innuendo, “home is where my sax is.”
Now her sax stays home.
A hundred years ago the clarinet was the dominant reed in jazz. It was displaced by the saxophone, and remains an understudy on the world’s jazz stage. Starting out on clarinet, Cohen, 47, switched to sax to go with the flow. “I was encouraged to pick up the sax so I could fit in all the jazz situations — the small group, the big band,” she said. “I focused on the sax for many years, while the clarinet was on the side, lurking, waiting for me to get my senses right.”
In an interview with the San Francisco Jazz Center she said that when she first visited Brazil in 2000 she only brought the more-portable clarinet and left the saxophone at home. She spent night after night sitting in with choro bands and breathing in the culture.
South American music and folkloric traditions brought her back to that original love. “I started to bring more and more clarinet into what I do,” she said, in an interview just after her plane arrived in New York. “I just said ‘you know what? I feel comfortable with this instrument, I feel I can be who I am.’ It’s my friend, it does what I want it to do, when I want it to do it. It’s a good team. And when I don’t take care of it enough, it tells me. It’s unforgiving.”
Credit: Yossi Zwecker
Credit: Yossi Zwecker
So far, she’s been taking care of that clarinet. She’s been voted clarinetist of the year every year from 2008 to 2021 by the Jazz Journalists Association. On her Bandcamp page, she writes “The clarinet took over my life. I am happily surrendering.”
Cohen travels to Atlanta with the Quartetinho, which is pronounced “quar-te-CHIN-yo” and means “little quartet” in Portuguese. The group includes Cohen on clarinet and bass clarinet, Vitor Gonçalves (accordion and piano), Tal Mashiach (bass and seven-string guitar) and James Shipp (percussion, vibraphone, and electronics).
The group will play Brazilian songs, contemporary compositions, even a little Antonín Dvořák.
The breadth of the material is typical of Cohen’s approach. Her new album “Quartetinho” includes the bouncy original, “Louisiana,” an insouciant blues with sharp angles reminiscent of Thelonious Monk. Alongside that is the dreamy, majestic, accordion-enhanced “Going Home.” (That’s the Dvořák.)
Look elsewhere in her discography and you’ll find the 2017 album “Rosa dos Ventos” which she recorded with the Trio Brasileiro. That includes “Choro Pesado,” which combines Latin rhythms with ridiculously fleet-footed unison passages.
Her new ensemble is a sub-group of her Tentet, an ambitious 10-member ensemble of New York musicians that includes clarinet, baritone sax, trumpet, trombone, cello and vibraphone.
That group made a splash with its Grammy-nominated 2019 album “Triple Helix” which included a multi-part clarinet concerto. Cohen is also part of an all-woman jazz ensemble called Artemis.
Newark public radio station WBGO describes Cohen and her composing partner Oded Lev-Ari as part of a “renaissance” of Israeli jazz musicians, enlivening the New York scene.
Cohen’s jazz training began at home, as the middle child of three musical siblings. She continued that training at the famed Berklee College of Music.
The performance by Quartetinho restarts the Molly Blank Concert Series at the Breman Museum, which has been on hiatus for two years due to the pandemic. Other concerts in the series will include a March 12 performance by pianist Joe Alterman and his long-time collaborator saxophonist Houston Person and an April 23 ensemble performance by a group of vocalists presenting the music of George and Ira Gershwin.
EVENT PREVIEW
Anat Cohen and Quartetinho
4 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 20. Concert and reception, $18-$60. The Breman Museum, 1440 Spring St., Atlanta. 678-222-3732, thebreman.org.
