Anat Cohen is coming to Fredonia in September.
The sound from her horn is round and golden — sometimes bright like the midday sun, but more often expressed in mellower tones, as when the day’s intensity gives way to infinite shades of color. The horn moves when she plays — swaying, dancing — while she loses herself in the melodies. The music communicates as if one soul is passing on thoughts directly to another.
This is a clarinet in the hands of the stunning jazz musician Anat Cohen.
A clarinet? Some Americans might associate the clarinet with big band swing. Young adults might think of its sound in band class, including the occasional, errant squeak. Jazz has had a history of amazing and groundbreaking clarinetists: Sidney Bechet, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Eddie Daniels, to name a few. But whoever you may know as a great master of the instrument, Cohen can be said to sit comfortably at the top of the heap. It is her mission to remind people of how beautiful of an instrument it is. “I’m helping people think the clarinet is cool.”
Ben Waltzer, a jazz educator at Columbia University, writes, “(She) turned to the band to count off ‘Limehouse Blues,’ authoritatively and at a swift tempo. After playing the melody, she began to improvise, building short motifs into longer, harmonically challenging disquisitions. Over the music she draped long tones that seemed to be kept afloat by the drummer’s rhythmic jabs.
She bent and shook notes, projecting sound with a physicality that became a dance. The clarinet seems to have a plaintive, pre-modern quality built in, and her sound evoked at once the blues, antique worlds, and indistinct old countries.”
Indeed, Cohen is an international musician. She was born in Tel Aviv to a musical family, and grew up studying music at an arts-focused school. She earned an invitation to study at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, where she honed her craft on the saxophone. She decided to move to New York City where she knew she’d be able to play with other musicians from all over the world. She was an almost immediate success, as she absorbed the sounds and talents of others.
The New Yorker Magazine says “Anat Cohen is a present day multicultural wonder. She’s an enthralling clarinetist and a persuasive saxophonist, displaying a pan-historical, pan-cultural approach to jazz.”
Over the past two decades in New York, she has never stopped growing and expanding. “Swing, samba, Middle Eastern and classical influences [co-exist] in her organic and inviting concept.” (New York Times). “When I play,” she says, “I respect the source of the music, whether it’s Cuban, Brazilian or Israeli. I try to bring that to all of the music I play. Music has no borders and no flags.”
Jazz is, after all, the epitome of a cultural mash-up. It began in New Orleans in the late 19th century as a blend of European classical music, popular marches, blues and spirituals, and cooked in a pot that had wealth and poverty, piety and decadence, and freedom and slavery, mixed together in open, visible contrast. In most places of the world, people will try to shield themselves from such cultural dissonance, happier to observe it from afar. But where that’s not possible, and interculturalism is barren and obvious, this can become a birthplace of great music.
Cohen’s musical journey is shaped by her personal relationship with Israel and the challenges of the Middle East. The journey has also taken her to Brazil where she has eagerly incorporated those sounds into her work. It may also explain her love of New York City, a melting pot of cultures, neighborhood by neighborhood. “I’ve always been attracted to multicultural music,” she says. “It’s where the world is going.”
Anat is a master at soprano and tenor saxophone, but she has gradually returned to her first instrument. She has found her unique voice with the clarinet, and it has become an extension of herself. Through it, she dances, sings, entertains and communicates, and she loves to collaborate with other musicians who can do the same on their own instruments. Consistently she plays with unbridled freedom and “infectious joy,” says The New York Times.
Clarifying everything, she says: “The clarinet took over my life. I am happily surrendering.”
Cohen will be appearing with Tal Maschiach on bass, Gadi Lehavi on piano, and Ofri Nehemya on drums at the 1891 Fredonia Opera House on Saturday, Sept. 19 at 7 p.m. as part of the 2024 Fredonia Jazz Festival. To learn more, visit fredoniajazzsociety.com.