ANAT COHEN Press Quotes

Cohen, who is fast becoming the most interesting clarinetist of her generation, played with

great physicality – lurching, thrusting, blowing at length with eyes closed and head down – but

at the heart of her performance was a commitment to enjoy herself…She had the audience in

her palm.

I like her clarinet sound: dry and woody, a little rough but not too much. Kind of like Benny

Goodman's… Anat Cohen sounds like she's just hitting her stride on clarinet. That makes her

one to watch.

A clarinetist of reliable ebullience

The lyric beauty of her tone, the easy fluidity of her technique and the utterly extroverted

manner of her delivery — with the clarinetist practically dancing as she played — made this

music wholly accessible to all . . . It didn't matter if she was playing age-old standards,

Brazilian choro music or Cuban popular song — she made it all urgently appealing.

Nobody will ever mistake Anat Cohen for any other clarinetist. She’s got a full, round tone

with a sensitive core that coasts over her accompaniment like a cork bobbing on the waves.

A rising star on saxophone and clarinet is Anat Cohen, to whom I said when I

first heard her, ―You have the soul of Ben Webster,‖ Duke Ellington’s passionate

tenor saxophonist. Actually, it’s her own soul that drives her music – and her

arrangement and compositions. –Nat Hentoff

Clarinet Beyond Goodman: Anat Cohen Moves Beyond a “Rising Star” at the Dakota By: Andrea Canter Published: April 28, 2010

In a recent Jazz Times “Before and After” column, Anat Cohen, after listening to a track by bassist Nillson Matta, described the music as “ an elastic pole moving from side to side.” It would be an apt metaphor for her own clarinet. Over the past decade, the Berklee-trained, New York-based Israeli native has transformed the clarinet and its repertoire from its roots in Dixieland and Swing to a fully modern and leading voice on today's jazz scene. Perennial winner of “Rising Star” polls among critics, Cohen’s trajectory surely has surpassed “up and coming” status with her “Benny Goodman and Beyond” project, recorded live at the Village Vanguard in summer 2009 and just released as Clarinetwork: Live at the Village Vanguard on her Anzic label. And the leader surrounded herself with the best in the business—pianist Benny Green, bassist Peter Washington and drummer Lewis Nash.

Sunday night (4/25), for the first time since the Vanguard sessions, this quartet reunited for a brief tour starting in Minneapolis at the Dakota Jazz Club. Maybe it was

the long hiatus, or perhaps the pleasant surprise of an early spring in Minnesota, or the nearly full-house crowd that issued an enthusiastic welcome. Or, more likely, the high-spirited, ebullient interaction among the musicians simply reflected their love of the music and each other’s company.

To say that Anat Cohen is a virtuoso barely suggests her multidimensional chops and passionate execution. In her hands (and mouth), the clarinet is indeed “an elastic pole moving from side to side,” as well as up and down, a dance partner, the jazz ventriloquist’s “dummy.” There seems to be no emotion that she can not convey in a few notes. Early in his career, after pawning his sax, Charlie Parker played a borrowed clarinet for a short time. Anat Cohen gives us some idea of what Bird might have accomplished if he had not returned to the saxophone.

Like the Pied Piper, Anat had us following every note, caught up in her swaying momentum from the first chorus of a fast-swinging “Sweet Georgia Brown” to the last elegant tones of her encore, “Goodbye,” the only repeat across the two sets. The playlist was filled with tunes from the Benny Goodman songbook, some that have become standards for one generation after another: “Sweet Georgia Brown” (punctuated by Washington’s bouncy basslines); “After You’ve Gone” (ignited by Lewis, who may have the fasted hands in modern percussion); an elegant “Body and Soul” (worth the price of admission for Cohen’s cadenza alone); “St. Louis Blues” (elevated by Washington’s strutting and Nash’s vocals); a modern twist on “Poor Butterfly (yet thoroughly informed by its point of origin); a “St. James Infirmary” straight out of the Big Easy; “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” (and what an Oscar Peterson-inspired Benny Green can do!); and an exquisite reading of “Memories of You.”

But there were other Goodman treasures that are less often in modern repertoire: Jelly Roll Morton’s madly swinging “Someday Sweetheart” (an exhibition for Benny Green’s precise-at-any-speed articulation); the delightfully Latinized “Slipped Disk”; a dazzling “Lullabye of the Leaves”; “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” (Anat’s showcase of trilling triplets); and the encore, “Goodbye,” beautiful in the first set, even more luxurious in closing the night.

Each musician contributes substantially to the whole. Green is unmatched for his powerhouse swing and dexterity, yet never a moment of bombast or technical wizardry for its own sake. Washington plays the straight man, all his emotion coming through his bass, whether taking a slow walk or acrobatic hippity hop. And Nash, beyond those blindingly fast hands, has one of the most fluent and sophisticated vocabularies in modern jazz drumming, and is simply fun to watch as he interacts with every note, every space.

And Anat Cohen! Her reverence for clarinet tradition is as evident as is her passion for communicating in her own voice, a voice that channels the great vocalists of the 30s and 40s, the great horns of bebop, and the swirling sounds and phrasing of freer approaches to harmony and improvisation, splashed with bright tropical colors. With the clarinet she becomes a singer, a dancer, a poet, a mad scientist, laughing—musically—with the sheer delight of reaching that new place, that new feeling, with each chorus. With the dizzying speed of a saxophone, the eloquent legato of a violin or the slippery slides of a trumpet, Anat takes the clarinet “beyond” Goodman, into the 21st century, and back to its rightful place as a lead instrument. And with Cohen in her rightful place as leader of the band.

And what would Benny Goodman say about this resurgence of the clarinet? Maybe “Sing, Sing, Sing.”

Anat Cohen: Clarinetwork Live at the Village Vanguard By: Raul d’Gama Rose

Anat Cohen Clarinetwork Live at the Village Vanguard Anzic Records 2010 Anat Cohen can make the clarinet sing—literally and figuratively. On Clarinetwork Live at the Village Vanguard her wonderful, flowing melodic lines swoop and soar like arias placating the most high. It is as if—in that spiritualised state of grace—Cohen, in her singular, burnished or blushing tone, is voicing the murmurings of the soul set free by the music. Cohen is an anomaly in contemporary music. She is not bound by metaphor and idiom, genre or species. Her home is where her heart is, be that the gentle, wistful shuffle of Brasilian choro or

the wild abandon of swing or bebop. On Clarinetwork, she is entrenched in recasting the era that was glorified by Benny Goodman. In fact, as 2009 was a Benny Goodman centennial, this album was recorded as a deeply felt homage to one of a handful of legendary practitioners of the clarinet. As a homage to Goodman, this album is by far one of the finest tributes made to that musician. However, it is impossible not to be continuously under the spell of Cohen herself. Her technique is impossibly refined and she can glide from altissimo through clarino to chalumeau seemingly effortlessly. How she is able to play microtonal intervals and the resultant quarter notes at breakneck speeds is a mystery best left unsolved, because on this album it is a joy to hear her duel with that other virtuoso, pianist Benny Green. Cohen's technique is so supple that she plays some wild and wonderful trills at the conclusion of her phrases, as effortlessly as she might usher in a new phrase after a barely discernable vibrato is employed to close a preceding one. And she appears to have an endless stream of improvisational ideas issuing forth from her clarinet.

There are times when Cohen and Green recall the delightful 1980 musical conversation between Goodman and pianist Teddy Wilson on "Sweet Georgia Brown." On "Lullaby of the Leaves," however, that give and take and get up and go may be surpassed by Cohen and Green, whose unbridled improvisation from chorus to chorus appears to stem from a cornucopia of musical ideas that take the song to places it has never been before. Cohen's fabulously brooding chalumeau tone at the start of "St. James Infirmary" is breathtakingly beautiful, and when she starts to ascend the registers as the blues builds toward the end of the 12-bar cycle there is a sense of wonder that might suggest that Cohen is one of today's finest examples of clarinet virtuosity. However, the suggestion that there are only two improvising players on stage may be remiss. As a matter of fact, Peter Washington probably never gets sufficient credit for his outstanding accompaniment on the bass. To discover that he was personally sought out for this special assignment by Cohen is a comforting thought. Washington is a virtuoso who has the ability to unearth exquisite hidden harmonies from his instrument. His flawless technique and acute sense of melody enables him to interpret songs with monstrous harmonic ingenuity, and his natural sense of melodic swing as he hits notes that never were part of the original melody, but now seem extraordinarily part of the tune, is stunning. He is also bang on the pulse time after time—something that he displays beautifully on "St. Louis Blues," "Body And Soul" and "What A Little Moonlight Can Do." Drummer Lewis Nash, who not only kept time for the later incarnation of the Don Pullen/George Adams Quartet, but also provided his considerable talent for saxophonist Branford Marsalis' Grammy nominated sojourn, Random Abstract (Sony, 1988), fits the rhythm section like the other glove. Nash's singular sense of timbre and melodic gracefulness is what sets him apart as a percussionist, providing a constant reminder that he is both accompanist extraordinaire as well as lead voice when called upon to be one. His star turn on "St. Louis Blues" is a case in point. The gentle sway of "Body And Soul" provides further evidence of h8s ingenuity, as he colors the song with hushed tones behind Green's dazzling runs and Cohen's low register undulations. Even at 69:31 minutes this album may be an all-too-short snapshot of the actual concert. If it is then the hope that this ensemble will get together again is alive and well. There is never enough of a good thing, especially when it comes to the art of music and especially in a gig that bristles with genius. Tracks: Sweet Georgia Brown; Lullaby Of The Leaves; Band Announcement; St. James Infirmary; After You've Gone; St. Louis Blues; Body And Soul; What A Little Moonlight Can Do. Personnel: Anat Cohen: clarinet; Benny Green: piano; Peter Washington: bass; Lewis Nash: drums.

Israeli Clarinetist Anat Cohen Featured Sunday at Litchfield Jazz Festival By: Owen McNally Published August 4, 2010 Anat Cohen, one of the best among Israel's many jazz exports to the United States, demonstrates her world-class clarinet chops Sunday night as she performs with her quartet at the 15th annual Litchfield Jazz Festival in Kent. A highlight of the star-studded weekend bash, the multi-talented Tel Aviv native pays homage to legendary clarinet virtuoso Benny Goodman (1909-1986) in a swinging salute to "The King of Swing" called "Clarinet Work: Benny Goodman & Beyond." Her partners include the great pianist Benny Green, who appears on her vibrant tribute album to Goodman, "Clarinet Work: Live at the Village Vanguard" (Anzic Records). Barak Mori is on bass, Obed Calvaire on drums. A rousing tenor saxophonist, diverse composer and a genre-crossing bandleader with a taste for world music (particularly Brazil's urban style called choro), Cohen has been hailed by American critics as an irrepressibly bold, new voice for jazz in the 21st century. Critical applause has been loudest for her technically superb, passionate, fluent playing on clarinet. The clarinet in recent years has been declining as a primary jazz instrument. That plus the fact that Cohen is a woman and hails from a small nation thousands of miles away from New York City, the epicenter of the male-dominated jazz universe, make her emergence on the American scene even more remarkable. Cohen came to the States in 1996 as a scholarship student at Boston's Berklee College of Music. She credits her success in to the rigorous and empathetic teachers she had in Israel, where she began studying clarinet at 12. Her loving, supportive parents backed not only her musical aspirations but also those of her two horn-playing brothers, Avishai and Yuval. Younger brother Avishai is now a noted trumpeter on the New York scene (no relation to another Israeli jazz notable, bassist Avishai Cohen). Older brother Yuval, a hot tenor saxophonist, was the first of the Cohen clan to go to Berklee in search of musical enlightenment. Billed as The Three Cohens, the tightly-knit siblings have collaborated on a fine recording called "Braids" on Anzic Records, a premium indie label co-owned and founded by Anat. "My parents never said to me, 'Why don't you go and get a real profession?' And that really helped," Anat Cohen says by phone from her New York apartment, just back from a summer vacation with her family back home in Tel Aviv. "A little bit of talent is probably necessary, but our parents' dedication was vital, as were the really good teachers in Israel who passed on a sense of discipline and a genuine passion to us that inspired us to want to make jazz our dream and go for it. "Influences at home, including classical music, were not all specifically jazz, but the family radio was always on. … So there was always some connection to American culture, to American music. "My father had lived in the States in the 1960s for a while and came to love American Songbook material. Even today, he sometimes recognizes singers that I never even heard of, which is beautiful and inspiring," she says. When Anat was 16, she began majoring in jazz at the prestigious Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts. After graduation, she served in the military from 1993-1995, playing tenor saxophone in the Israeli Air Force Band. In one of the turning points in her life, the teenaged Cohen auditioned for Berklee College in Tel Aviv (the college sends auditioning reps around the world), won a scholarship and moved to Boston, where she discovered world music and many kindred, jazz-obsessed souls. "Oh, my God! Boston was incredible. I had some of the best experiences of my life there at Berklee because I met a bunch of other people who were at the exact same stage in life and interest as me. There were American and international students all wrapped up in the Berklee environment, where you basically did nothing but music 24/7," she says. After Berklee came her next giant step, the Big Apple rite of passage. It marked the beginning of her romance with New York City, a love second only to her hometown of Tel Aviv. "When I moved to New York City, there were a lot of people already there that I knew from Berklee. With jazz, it's almost like you belong to some kind of additional family, a connection with people because they're all coming from the same place," she says.

For Cohen, it initially meant running faster and faster until she had to slow down, reflect, sort things out and find her own voice and personal definition of what music is. "When I got to New York, I was playing choro music and modern music and would run around to all the clubs, as much as I could, playing every kind of genre at three or four places a night. After a while, I'd say to myself, 'I want to do this kind of music. No, I want to do that kind. Or maybe this kind.' I got so overwhelmed, I was almost breathless. "Finally, I said to myself, 'Hold on! Music is music, no matter how it's categorized.' I realized I might call something jazz, for example, but people from Brazil might call the same thing instrumental Brazilian music. "My philosophy is simply that music is music, regardless of category. So I let other people define what it is, how it's categorized or what it's called. "For me, whatever music feels good is where I'm going to find myself."

Anat Cohen carries the clarinet into the 21st century Israeli native could become the most prominent jazz clarinetist since Benny Goodman By: Rick Mason Published: April 17, 2010 With a ferocious, rafters-rattling sound, scurrying, cutting-edge improvisations, dizzying eclecticism and, by all accounts, a charismatic presence that overflows the bandstand, Anat Cohen appears on the brink of taking the jazz world by storm. And since the clarinet has emerged as her primary instrument, the Israeli native could become the most prominent jazz player on the long-neglected licorice stick since Benny Goodman. It’s a comparison that might rankle her a bit, simply because the clarinet’s fall from grace has kept it overwhelmingly associated with the King of Swing. “It’s pretty incredible how famous and successful he was in 1938, and we are in 2010 and yet the clarinet is still associated with Benny Goodman,” Cohen said by phone from New York recently. “Most people know it as a swing instrument — a specific style. It’s not the same as a tenor saxophone, as far as the evolution and how many people were innovating on the instrument.” Still, she said, “Benny Goodman has a respected place in my heart.” In fact, Goodman essentially is responsible for Cohen’s first local visit as a bandleader. Next Sunday at the Dakota Jazz Club she’ll lead a stellar quartet — pianist Benny Green, bassist Peter Washington and drummer Lewis Nash — premiering the road version of their just-released album “Clarinetwork: Live at the Village Vanguard,” recorded last July at the iconic New York jazz club. The session came about when Vanguard owner Lorraine Gordon asked Cohen to put together a celebration of the clarinet. “Realizing that it was Benny Goodman’s *birth+ centennial, and knowing how much she loves Benny Goodman, I figured it’s a great opportunity to play his repertoire, which I really hadn’t done,” she said. “So I called some of the swingingest musicians I know. Choosing the repertoire was very easy because Benny Goodman recorded almost every possible standard. We didn’t really try to play a certain way — we just let the music take us wherever it wants to go.” All the destinations are dazzling, from wonderfully warm versions of ballads such as “Body and Soul” to wild, kinetic runs through “St. James Infirmary” and “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

A style-shifter Now in her mid-30s, Cohen has had a profound impact on the New York scene since arriving in 1999. She has played in a boggling array of ensembles and styles: traditional and modern jazz, big band, chamber music, samba, choro, tango. She recorded four additional, critically acclaimed albums as a leader, as well as discs with brothers Yuval (saxophone) and Avishai (trumpet) as 3 Cohens, Waverly Seven (a tribute to Bobby Darin) and the Jason Linder Big Band, among others. All were released on her own label, Anzic, which has been credited with invigorating the New York jazz scene. “I’ve always belonged to a bunch of different bands,” she said. “The best part about living in New York is that you are able to play with different people in different styles in the same week. It’s really part of who I am as a musical person. I try to incorporate everything that I encounter.” Although she started studying clarinet at age 12 in Tel Aviv and was soon immersed in traditional New Orleans music (“I absolutely adored it”), she eventually took a long detour on tenor sax. “When I got into high school, clarinet was not really in fashion. Everybody had electric bands.” It wasn’t until she attended Boston’s Berklee College of Music that an instructor overheard her playing clarinet and urged her to pursue it, which she did with a growing arc of atypical influences, particularly Brazilian choro, a predecessor of samba. “My influences, I have to confess, are less of the clarinet players and more people like *saxophonists+ John Coltrane and Dexter Gordon, and [trumpeters] Miles Davis and Lee Morgan. The music that really brought me back to the clarinet was folkloric music, from Brazil, from Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela. Choro music, there is interaction, improvisation, melody interpretation. It can be very virtuosic, it can be very melancholic. It was just wonderful and very demanding, so my fingers had to run up and down the instrument.”

Cohen clearing new path for clarinet By: Howard Reich Published: April 23, 2010 When Anat Cohen was growing up in Israel, in the 1970s and '80s, opportunities to hear world-class jazz musicians in person were scarce. Though Tel Aviv teemed with local artists playing the music, American virtuosos who defined the art form only sporadically crossed her radar, she says. Nonetheless, in recent years Cohen — who plays Friday night at Symphony Center on a double-bill with Joshua Redman — has emerged as one of the most promising clarinetists in jazz. Having studied at the esteemed Berklee College of Music in Boston in the mid-1990s and blossomed thereafter in New York, she stands as a singular voice on the instrument. Her recording "Notes From the Village" (Anzic Records) ranked among the best of 2008, the clarinetist applying the high-spirited sensibility of an earlier generation of players to a contemporary musical language. Further, her ventures in Brazilian choro music, Afro-Cuban jazz and other world-music genres have shown the breadth of her musical tastes and instrumental techniques. All of which was made possible, she says, by the unique combination of early training in her homeland and the revelations that followed in the United States. "I had a pretty good level (of playing) already in Israel," says Cohen. But in America she began to encounter "exceptional individuals. They start to play, and they blow your mind." Back then, in the mid-'90s, Cohen was playing more saxophone than clarinet, the transition to the higher-pitched instrument practically sneaking up on her. "After graduating from Berklee and coming to New York, I found myself playing South American rhythms — choro music, music from Argentina and Colombia and Venezuela and Brazil. Music that the clarinet sounds very comfortable in — more comfortable than the modern jazz I was involved in. "So, I started to play more and more clarinet. And since choro music can be pretty virtuosic and very emotional, I think my technique was getting better through playing it." Certainly the tonal radiance of her work shone through on the album "Poetica" (Anzic, 2007), which won wide critical acclaim and helped shape listeners' perceptions of Cohen as a clarinetist to heed. "Suddenly, I was a clarinet player," she says. "It was never my intention, and it was never what I was aiming for. "It was such an obvious part of me that I didn't see it." But there was another force at work in Cohen's ascent. In recent years, clarinetists such as Don Byron, Victor Goines and Dr. Michael White have made significant strides in returning the instrument to some prominence in jazz. Though the clarinet may never again enjoy the massive popularity generated by Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw more than half a century ago, there's no question it has enjoyed an uptick in activity and visibility. Our era — decidedly louder than that of Goodman and Shaw — may have less room for a comparatively soft-spoken instrument. But artists such as Byron, Goines and White have built a new audience for it. And Cohen is extending that listenership. Her new CD, "Clarinetwork: Live at the Village Vanguard" (Anzic Records), seems likely to continue the trend, if only because of the traditional, easy-to-grasp nature of its repertoire. Conceived and recorded last year as a centennial tribute to Goodman, the disc revisits vintage tunes such as "St. James Infirmary," "After You've Gone" and "What a Little Moonlight Can Do." And though its conservative nature will not thrill those who prefer to hear Cohen extending the boundaries of her art, the exuberant and freewheeling tone of her improvisations gives the proceedings a contemporary undertone. So, "Clarinetwork" seems likely to stoke the rising popularity of the instrument. "I do feel that as far as public perception goes, the clarinet is finally starting to clear a path," says Cohen. "There are definitely some great clarinet players out there. … I feel some people are shaking up the clarinet's status." And Cohen is one of them.

Jazz Standards Israeli clarinetist Anat Cohen, a master of expressive improvisation, Leads a talented wave of expatriate musicians flooding the New York jazz scene By: Ben Waltzer 01/26/10

Late one night this summer you could walk down East 27th Street in New York, enter a doorway under a neon sign that beamed “Jazz Standard,”

descend a staircase, and hear a clarinet wail. Anat Cohen was leading her quartet in material from her latest recording, Clarinetwork, a centennial

homage to Benny Goodman, as part of impresario George Wein’s Carefusion Jazz Festival.

Cohen, who has curly brown hair and a round, brightly expressive face set off by a barely perceptible nose ring, turned to the band to count off

“Limehouse Blues,” a showpiece of Goodman’s, 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 drummer

Lewis Nash’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. As the crowd

applauded, Wein, 85, beamed at his protégée from the corner banquette where he was sitting, his hands resting on an upright walking cane. Cohen

paused to look at her watch. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” she said, smiling, before introducing the band.

Wein—a pre-eminent figure in the jazz world for five decades and founder of the Newport and New Orleans jazz festivals—met Cohen three years

ago at a concert sponsored by the Sidney Bechet Society, named for the legendary New Orleans soprano saxophonist. “I heard her play ‘Shreveport

Stomp’ and was blown away,” he said. “Her approach to jazz is total. She’s got big ears and respects the tradition but isn’t locked into it. She just

played a festival in Puerto Rico and got a standing ovation from 3,000 people. She wasn’t playing salsa but ‘Memories of You.’ ”

For Cohen the last few years have been a blur, recording, performing, founding Anzic, her record company, and earning accolades. She’s been

named Clarinetist of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association of America four years running. In 2007 and 2008 she placed at the top of Downbeat

Magazine’s International Critics Poll in the “Rising Star: Clarinet” category. This year she was named its top rising jazz star overall.

Watching Cohen play, it’s clear why her popularity is growing. Whether on tenor or soprano saxophone or clarinet, Cohen plays with an emotional

directness that connects with the listener, which is rare in the New York jazz scene, where musicians are often more apt to display skill than convey

feeling. Cohen entertains without pandering. If Cohen isn’t playing, she’s roving around the bandstand, rooting on the soloist, singing back a phrase

she liked, doing a dance. She treats the bandstand like her living room, putting her audience at ease. At one gig, she played like a snake charmer,

sitting cross-legged on the floor with audience members who couldn’t get a seat.

While Cohen’s musical voice is highly individual, she is also one of a growing number of Israelis on the New York jazz scene today. If you look at the

jazz listings, you’re apt to see the following names appearing regularly: Cohen, Avital, Degibri, Silberstein, Aran, Ravitz, Mor, Klein, Tal. And younger

Israeli musicians keep coming. For the last few years, Israelis have made up about 9 percent of the student body at the New School for Jazz and

Contemporary Music. “Ironically, it’s the Israeli musicians that come who are keeping the flame of the bebop tradition alive,” said Martin Mueller,

executive director of the New School’s jazz program. “When they come here, they’re able to take it in so many directions. And there’s an intensity

to the music that comes from a culture surrounded on all sides by either water or enemies.”

The level of talent from Israel at times seems uncanny: A YouTube video of Gadi Lehavi, a 13-year-old piano prodigy, playing a duet with

saxophonist David Liebman at Smoke, the uptown club, is a sensation in music circles less for the teenager’s prodigious technique than for his

probing maturity at the keyboard. Recently at Fat Cat, the Greenwich Village jazz club and pool hall, the veteran black American drummer Billy Kaye

led his group through a set of taut hard-bop that sounded as authentic and creative as any Blue Note record from the early sixties. It turned out

that three members of the quintet, pianist Jack Glottman, bassist Ben Meigners, and saxophonist Asaf Yuria, are Israelis under 35. Between games

of ping-pong, Amit Friedman, a young saxophonist who had come to hear his friends before returning to Israel the next day, commented on the

level of jazz talent among his peers: “Maybe it’s a little bit corny, but Jews have had to improvise for thousands of years in order to survive. It’s

natural to us.”

Anat Cohen, the middle of three children, was born in 1975 and grew up in Tel Aviv. Yuval, her older brother, is a saxophonist, and Avishai, the

youngest son, is one of New York’s most prominent trumpeters; together they form the group 3 Cohens. Their grandparents fled Poland in the

early 1930s, and their great-uncle helped found Kibbutz Ein Harod. “It’s very difficult in today’s society to live in this idea,” said Anat Cohen,

referring to the collectivist ideal of the kibbutz movement, over lunch in Union Square. Earlier, waiting for a table, she’d chatted with a waiter in

Portunhol, a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese. “There’s always going to be someone who wants more, who wants something else,” she said. “I

could never really figure out why people would live in a kibbutz. I’m such a city girl.”

Her now-retired parents, David and Bilha—he was in real estate, and she was a teacher—supported their children’s growing interest in music. “My

father knew classical music very well,” said Cohen. “Driving in the car, listening to the radio he could name every composer, every movement, what

piece it was. I was fascinated by the way he recognized who wrote what.”

At age 10, Cohen started on the keyboard and at age 12 switched to the clarinet and began playing in a Dixieland band at the Jaffa Conservatory of

Music, where she could begin to feel the rhythm of jazz while still following a written part. At age 16, she began playing tenor saxophone in the big

band at the prestigious Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts in Tel Aviv.

Insipired by Dexter Gordon and John Coltrane records, Cohen began to absorb the jazz tradition, but she found few opportunities beyond school

performances to develop her musical voice, and like many young musicians she was daunted by the prospect of improvisation. That changed when

she met a saxophonist from the Brownsville section of Brooklyn who had immigrated to Israel and shaken up the music scene, Arnold Lawrence

Finkelstein, or Arnie Lawrence.

“Arnie is very much responsible for me being here,” said Cohen, remembering him fondly. “I met him when I was a soldier. Something about Arnie

that was always so pure. He would talk to you without any judgment or preconception. I’m a human being, you’re a human being, let’s

communicate. That was his vibe. I was not used to that. Israel, as wonderful as it is, it’s a very intense place. The level of life there is just very

stressful. People are always alert. They have a famous phrase in Hebrew: ‘respect and suspect.’ You always have to kind of check what’s going on

around you. People are not always just, ‘We’re all here, we’re all together,’ because you never know.”

Lawrence, who was born in 1938, was a passionate figure. Tutored at a young age by the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, Lawrence at age 17 was

leading bands at Birdland, once sharing a double-bill with John Coltrane. In 1986 he founded the New School Jazz and Contemporary Music

Program. Over the years, he would visit Israel with his wife, Liza, a native, making contacts and meeting musicians and performing. By the mid-

1990s, Lawrence found himself with fewer gigs and increasingly at odds with the New School’s administration over his nontraditional teaching

approach. Liza’s mother’s health was also declining. So, in 1997, Lawrence and Liza moved to Israel permanently to begin anew.

In Jerusalem, Lawrence founded the International Center for Creative Music, which welcomed Jews and Arabs alike. There he would hold his

weekly “Harif” sessions, named for a spice. Whoever showed up would be the band that night.

“Every Wednesday we would go,” said Cohen. “I would get in the car, my two brothers and I, and drive to Jerusalem. It was the most special thing

for us to do. Maybe there would be just bass or just drums, sometimes just seven saxophones. Arnie would call tunes, play open grooves,

whatever, pointing at people to solo. I was the most insecure one at the time, because I was the latest of us coming into jazz. He gave me

confidence. He would talk to me after sets about beauty, about people, wonderful vague conversations, not about this note or scale. He was the

first one who told me there were no wrong notes.”

Walking south on Loisada Street in New York’s Lower East Side, toward The Stone, the experimental jazz club, one steamy evening in late May, you

had to pass through music to get to music. The neighborhood, which long ago teemed with the street life of Eastern European Jews, was alive with

the sounds of the Hispanic immigrants who followed. Two congueros sat drumming near East 4th Street as neighborhood folks, heads bobbing,

some singing, gathered slowly to them like flower petals blooming in reverse. Sidewalk barbecues smoked.

Nearby, another crowd gathered on the corner of Loisada and East 2nd, outside The Stone. Approaching, you could hear English speckled with

Hebrew being spoken by yet newer immigrants, young, hiply dressed, with black instrument cases slung over their shoulders. Inside, the small

club—no liquor, no food, just music—was packed beyond capacity for New York’s first Festival of Israeli Jazz.

“If you have to lose liquid, let it be sweat and not tears,” said the trombonist Rafi Malkiel, from the stage. It was both a reference to the heat in the

room and an epigraph to his composition “River Blue,” binds Jewish and Arabic melodic traditions together within the traditional 12-bar blues

form. Malkiel’s newest music, heavily informed also by the Latin groups in which he’s played, is inspired by the concept of water, of life’s liquid

nature, its currents of influence.

The ensemble, which includes Cohen and her brother Avishai, began to weave together in rigorously arranged polyphony, grooving muscularly

through the Middle Eastern-tinged minor blues. When it finished, Malkiel, an Israeli of Moroccan heritage, thanked the festival’s organizer and

curator, Roberto Juan Rodriguez, who stood in the back.

“It takes a Cuban to put on a festival of Israeli music in New York,” said Malkiel, smiling. “I promise you, next year we’ll have a Cuban music festival

in Israel.”

Rodriguez, 51, whose close-cropped silvering hair belies his youthful enthusiasm, is a drummer, composer, and the founder of the Sexteto

Rodriguez Cuban Jewish All Stars, which appeared this summer at the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow (or, as he calls it, the “big powwow”). His

group, accented by clarinet and accordion, combines Cuban son and klezmer, evoking an imaginary world where the Buena Vista Social Club and a

chapter of the Jewish Labor Bund might exist on the same street.

“I grew up in the Jewish community. I did weddings, bar mitzvahs, and Yiddish theater down in Miami Beach,” said Rodriguez by phone from the

Catskill home he shares with his wife, drummer Susie Ibarra, and their young son. “It’s interesting to see the similarities between their culture and

mine. I’d go over to my friends’ houses, and their furniture would be covered in plastic. I’d go over to my aunt’s house and their furniture would be

covered in plastic. ‘You can’t sit on it! You can’t touch it!’ They’re warm cultures, passionate cultures, and they both have a certain kind of

schmaltz. It was easy to just blend in. I never considered Jews to be white. They’d say ‘I’m white.’ ‘No, you’re Jewish.’ ”

Rodriguez’s artistic enterprise, to showcase the various ways Israeli musicians are combining these influences with jazz, was not, however, immune

to the political pressures that follow Israelis wherever they go, regardless of their politics. Shortly before the festival began, Rodriguez received an

email from Andrew Fellus, a New York music producer and organizer of Artists Against Apartheid, a group that works in concert with the Palestinian

Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and its counterpart in the United States. Some performers have heeded the groups’ call

to boycott Israel. Elvis Costello characterized his cancellation of a recent show as “matter of instinct and conscience.” Carlos Santana and the Pixies

have joined in the boycott. Fellus’ email to Rodriguez read: “I noticed that you are curating the upcoming Israeli jazz festival, and curious if you

realize this event is being promoted by the Israeli Consulate? You might not want to have your event associated with a government that is

responsible for the ongoing ethnic cleansing, colonization and dispossession of Palestinian land.”

Rodriguez replied to Fellus by email: “I am a friend of all musicians and artists from all over the world regardless of what country they are from. I do

not appreciate your actions against me curating a program of Israeli musicians who live in New York City, or anyone else for that matter.” He ended

the letter: “Where politics and boycotts fall short, music and art goes a very long way. I am inviting you to come and listen to the music. I hope you

can make it.”

The first Festival of Israeli Jazz ended without controversy. But the day after its last show, Israeli forces raided a flotilla of ships attempting to break

its blockade of the Gaza strip. A battle ensued aboard the lead ship, the Mavi Marmara, that resulted in nine deaths, sparking international outrage

and further energizing the movement to boycott Israel. Next year’s festival, which Rodriguez hopes to expand into the Abrons Art Center, may not

proceed so smoothly. Fellus’ group was planning to protest an upcoming concert by the Jerusalem String Quartet. The quartet’s April concert in

London’s Wigmore Hall was disrupted by hecklers, which forced the BBC to stop its live broadcast of the recital.

“I have an ambivalent feeling about the Israeli army,” said Cohen. “Growing up in Tel Aviv, being involved in the arts, the last thing artists want to

do is fight.” Young Israeli musicians can audition for a limited number of spots in Israel Defense Force bands; the result can determine whether you

end up playing Ellington or invading Gaza. Cohen was accepted into the Air Force Band prior to her induction.

“Basic training was not fun, but it was an interesting experience,” said Cohen. “You’re finishing high school, summer vacation, everything’s

beautiful, you’re an optimist, you’re a kid. You finish your exams and very quickly, in July, my mom takes me in the morning. I get on the bus, and

they close the doors. Someone’s shouting, ‘Don’t look out the windows!’ Your parents are still standing outside the bus. Immediately”—Cohen

snapped her fingers—“you lose your identity.”

Cohen hadn’t known that the First Festival of Israeli Jazz had become politicized, but it came as no surprise.

“I avoid as much as I can any political conversation mainly out of fear,” said Cohen. “It depends on the environment. I went to Dartmouth College

to play and went to Chabad House. I had no problem engaging in talking about politics. But I’m afraid of hostile reactions. With cab drivers I always

say I’m from Brazil. I don’t say I’m from Israel. It’s happened more than once that someone is blaming me for the government’s policy. And I say,

‘Listen, I live here. I’m a musician. I don’t call the shots.’ ”

As a kid, Cohen traveled abroad as part of youth orchestra. Its members were told not to wear yarmulkas or clothing with Hebrew slogans. “Just

hats,” said Cohen. “Try to mingle. It’s a good rule in general. Why be a target if you don’t have to? I remember taking a cab at 3 in the morning,

with a Muslim driver. He was explaining that he was not allowed to listen to music because it distracts attention from God. I revealed I was from

Israel and as we were just near my street, suddenly he locked the doors. And I freaked out. ‘Please don’t lock the doors.’ I immediately imagined

the worst. Maybe he wanted to intimidate me. That was the last time I told a cabdriver that I’m from Israel.”

Cohen returned to Israel last year during the incursion into the Gaza Strip. “Conflict is so rooted in the culture,” she said, pondering whether she

would ever return to Israel to live. “Everything is a consequence of something that happened before, and not seeing the end of it, it’s so difficult.

You cannot live there and not be involved in what’s going on. It got under my skin so deep I couldn’t shake it off. For the first time I told myself,

maybe not.”

Now that Israel may face the existential threat of a nuclear Iran, many have suggested that its best and brightest will increasingly choose to live

elsewhere. This summer, the Israeli Cabinet implemented a plan to stem “brain drain” among the country’s scientists. Academics are also choosing

increasingly work outside of the country.

Cohen suggested that it’s nothing new. “They don’t have to wait for a nuclear weapon from Iran for people to say this is an insane place,” she said.

“I keep meeting people who have been here for 30 years. They’re 100 percent Israelis, in their behavior, they way they talk. They visit Israel,

they’re connected, and have families there. Israel is a wonderful place to visit. But think about raising kids there. Suicide bombers? Having to send

your kid to the army?”

Cohen also noted that there are far fewer jazz stages to play in Israel.

“I’m having a great time and love being on stage, but the amount of stages in a small country is limited,” said Cohen, betraying what seemed like a

faint twinge of regret. “Going back to live in Israel is a serious decision.”

“If people just understood that jazz is about life, it’s about taking people from different backgrounds, put them in one room and say, ‘OK, start talk,

and communicate, make sense, explain where you come from, respect and listen, react and suggest and don’t take over, be polite,’ ” she said.

“How many times have you heard someone playing jazz but not really communicating? I don’t get it, just monologuing. It’s about dialogues and

conversations.”