[Dixielandjazz] ANAT COHEN - YOUNG + FEMALE + OKOM PLAYER

[Steve Barbone]

She plays Sax for Diva, but also plays Dixieland. If you are in the
Washington DC area she's at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater this coming
weekend for the "Women In Jazz Festival" and then at the Smithsonian a week
later with guitarist Howard Alden. For those who haven't heard her, she
swings her butt off.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


Anat Cohen, for All the World a Jazz Innovator
>From Dixieland to Klezmer, Her Scope Knows No Bounds

By Matt Schudel - Washington Post Staff Writer - Sunday, May 6, 2007;


When Anat Cohen was growing up in Tel Aviv, she traveled around the city
listening to Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald on her Walkman. She began
to play the clarinet at 12, then joined a Dixieland band and embarked on
what has become a lifelong cross-cultural journey.

In the years since, Cohen has emerged as one of the brightest, most original
young instrumentalists in jazz, playing saxophone and clarinet in no fewer
than seven working bands and almost as many styles, from Brazilian music to
Dixieland to modern jazz. Last month, she released two outstanding albums,
each showing a different side of her musical personality.

"I don't know what is the music I enjoy most because I enjoy all of them,"
says Cohen, speaking from her home in New York. "I like variety. It keeps
things interesting."

For six years, Cohen (whose first name is pronounced a-NOT) has played tenor
saxophone with Diva, the stellar all-female big band that performed last
year at the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival at the Kennedy Center.
This week, she brings her own quartet to the Kennedy Center's Terrace
Theater as the Friday night headliner at the 12th annual festival, which
runs Thursday through Saturday. A week later, she'll be back in town,
appearing at the Smithsonian Jazz Cafe at the National Museum of Natural
History with guitarist Howard Alden.

The 32-year-old Cohen represents a growing international jazz movement that
is reflected in this year's festival lineup, which features Brazilian singer
Flora Purim and Japanese pianists Hiromi and Mayuko Katakura. U.S.-born
performers include pianist Lynne Arriale, violinist Karen Briggs, Ann
Patterson's Maiden Voyage big band and singers Stephanie Jordan and Jeannie
Cheatham.

Cohen's early interest in jazz came about largely through the influence of
her family. "My father lived in the United States for 10 years, and he has a
great passion for the American songbook," she says. "He had a big record
collection and liked to play jazz and Frank Sinatra."

When she was about 9, her older brother, Yuval, took up the saxophone "and
he immediately started to play jazz and the music of Charlie Parker."

It wasn't so unusual, then, that the teenaged Anat would be playing
Dixieland in Tel Aviv, followed by other enriching musical detours. At an
arts high school in Tel Aviv, she intended to play classical clarinet, but
it happened to be the same year the school introduced a jazz program. She
picked up the tenor saxophone at 16 and chose Sonny Rollins and Dexter
Gordon as her stylistic models.

"As I grew up," she says, "I wanted to go further back and check out the
fathers of the saxophone. I listened to Illinois Jacquet, Jimmy Forrest,
Lester Young, Ben Webster."

She learned her lessons well. Today, Cohen plays tenor with a huge,
broad-shouldered tone that you hardly hear these days from anyone, male or
female. Critic Nat Hentoff, who has been chronicling jazz since the 1940s,
has written, "I hear the soul of Ben Webster in her tenor playing."

Cohen spent two years in an Israeli Air Force band, then came to Boston to
attend the Berklee College of Music, generally considered the leading jazz
academy in the world. Yuval was already at Berklee, and a younger brother,
trumpeter Avishai, came later. After Anat's Smithsonian appearance on May
18, she'll fly to Israel for a pair of reunion concerts with her brothers.
The "3 Cohens," as they bill themselves, will put out their second joint
album in September.

Meanwhile, Cohen and a business partner have launched a record label, Anzic,
on which she has just released two remarkably accomplished recordings,
"Noir" and "Poetica." On "Noir," she has assembled a crackerjack orchestra
that includes eight horns, three cellos, guitar, drums and percussion. The
adaptable group segues from Cuban and Brazilian music to ballads and
straight-ahead jazz -- sometimes in the same tune, as when the sinuous
"Samba de Orfeu" dances right into the arms of Louis Armstrong's "Struttin'
With Some Barbecue" without missing a step.