There are musicians whose careers can be understood through a single tradition, a recognizable lineage, or a clearly defined scene. Anat Cohen has never belonged comfortably to that category. Her music moves through jazz, Brazilian choro, samba, Caribbean rhythm, Middle Eastern memory, chamber-like lyricism, big-band color and the improvisational culture of New York without treating any of them as decorative additions to a central style. What makes Cohen distinctive is not simply that she has encountered many musical languages, but that she has learned to inhabit them. The clarinet, an instrument burdened with its own history inside jazz, became the ideal vehicle for that approach: flexible enough to laugh, cry, dance, whisper and accelerate through intricate lines, yet personal enough in Cohen’s hands to make stylistic boundaries feel secondary. By the time she emerged as one of the most important clarinetists of her generation, she had done something more significant than revive an instrument associated in the popular imagination with an earlier jazz age. She had demonstrated that the clarinet could speak convincingly inside a twenty-first-century music shaped by migration, cultural exchange and rhythmic curiosity. Cohen’s official biography describes her as a musician who became deeply involved with Brazilian music after discovering choro while studying at Berklee, eventually making Brazil a kind of second musical home.
That journey began in Tel Aviv, where Cohen grew up in a musical family alongside her brothers Yuval, a saxophonist, and Avishai, a trumpeter. She studied classical clarinet when young, but her relationship with improvisation developed gradually. As a teenager she took up tenor saxophone and began entering jazz through ensembles where the saxophone offered a more obvious route into the contemporary language. Cohen later recalled that she was around sixteen when she played clarinet in a Dixieland ensemble, an experience that exposed her to the communal excitement of early jazz even before improvisation had become fully natural to her. The coexistence of classical training, jazz discovery and the varied sounds surrounding her in Israel mattered. Cohen has spoken about growing up amid music carrying Russian, Moroccan, Brazilian, Venezuelan and Middle Eastern traces, as well as hearing quarter-tone inflections in her environment. This did not produce a tidy hybrid style. More importantly, it accustomed her ear to the idea that musical identity could contain several histories simultaneously.
From Tel Aviv to a Larger Rhythmic World
Cohen’s move to the United States to attend Berklee College of Music expanded that instinct dramatically. Berklee was not simply a place where she refined jazz harmony and improvisation; it placed her inside an international community of musicians for whom traditions that might have seemed geographically distant were present in rehearsal rooms, friendships and informal sessions. Cohen has specifically identified her encounters with Latin music there as transformative, saying that the flowing rhythms opened a new world of groove and added another dimension to her improvisational expression. She began playing with musicians from Brazil and Argentina, and choro became particularly important. Flutist Fernando Brandão brought her into a choro setting in Boston, and what might initially have been another musical encounter became a long-term relationship with Brazilian language and rhythm.
Choro was an especially revealing discovery for a clarinetist. Long before Cohen encountered it, Brazilian instrumental music had developed a culture in which virtuosity was inseparable from conversation. Melodies could be elaborate without becoming rigid; rhythmic propulsion could coexist with elegance; musicians could ornament, answer, anticipate and reshape phrases while remaining deeply connected to the collective pulse. For Cohen, this was not an exotic alternative to jazz. It offered another model of how improvisation could function. The clarinet’s agility suited choro’s quick turns and melodic flourishes, but its vocal quality mattered just as much. Cohen has noted an expressive “cry” shared by the clarinet in both choro and klezmer, even though she did not build her career primarily around klezmer. That observation reaches toward something central in her playing: traditions can meet not because they are superficially similar, but because musicians recognize comparable emotional possibilities inside them.
After Berklee, Cohen moved to New York, where the breadth of her musical interests became an advantage rather than a problem to solve. She toured with the Diva Jazz Orchestra and worked with Brazilian ensembles while developing her own identity on tenor saxophone and clarinet. New York offered precisely the kind of environment her music required: jazz clubs existed alongside Latin scenes, Brazilian musicians circulated through the city, and improvisers routinely crossed stylistic boundaries. Her development was therefore less a transition from one genre to another than an accumulation of musical relationships. The city allowed her to hear how different rhythmic systems could coexist with the harmonic and improvisational vocabulary she had already absorbed. Berklee’s account of her career notes that she settled in New York after graduation and began working with Brazilian groups, while her later career would take her from small clubs to major international festivals.
The Clarinet Returns to the Center
The most consequential decision in Cohen’s early career was also one that happened organically: the clarinet gradually reclaimed the central position in her musical life. Jazz history had given the instrument enormous visibility through figures such as Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and later Buddy DeFranco, but by the period in which Cohen was establishing herself, the saxophone had long dominated the modern jazz imagination. Cohen understood the historical associations surrounding the clarinet. She also understood the danger of being stylistically confined by them. At Berklee, trombonist and educator Phil Wilson heard something individual in her clarinet playing and encouraged her to develop it, even while she still considered the tenor saxophone her principal improvisational instrument. Over time, calls for Cohen as a clarinetist increased, particularly in jazz, Latin and folkloric settings, until the instrument effectively “took over” her professional life.
The shift became unmistakable in the middle of the 2000s. Cohen established Anzic Records in 2005 and began documenting a body of work in which the distinction between jazz musician and global improviser became increasingly unnecessary. Her 2007 releases Noir and Poetica presented contrasting contexts, with Poetica particularly significant because Cohen committed herself to the clarinet throughout the recording. The following year, Notes from the Village widened the frame again. Recorded with musicians including Jason Lindner, Omer Avital and Daniel Freedman, the album moved among Cohen’s originals and music associated with Ernesto Lecuona, John Coltrane, Sam Cooke and Fats Waller. Cohen played several members of the reed family, including soprano and tenor saxophones, clarinet and bass clarinet. Rather than suggesting indecision, that range revealed the principle already organizing her career: repertoire mattered less as a marker of genre than as material for a particular group of musicians to transform through improvisation.
Yet it was the clarinet that increasingly made Cohen recognizable. Its sound in her hands did not attempt to reproduce the swing era, nor did it reject that history. She could acknowledge the instrument’s past while placing it inside rhythmic and harmonic environments that Benny Goodman could scarcely have imagined. Her tone could be dark and rounded, but the defining quality was mobility. A Cohen phrase might begin with lyrical patience, accelerate into a cascade of notes, bend toward a vocal inflection and then return to the melody with an ease that made the entire detour feel inevitable. Her virtuosity rarely sounded like an argument for technical superiority. It functioned as conversational freedom: the greater her command of the instrument, the more spontaneously she could respond to what was happening around her.
Recognition followed. Cohen’s official biography credits her with becoming a major force in returning the clarinet to prominence in contemporary jazz, while her awards accumulated through critics’ and readers’ polls. More important than the trophies was what the attention represented. A musician born in Israel, educated partly in the United States, deeply engaged with Brazilian music and equally comfortable in straight-ahead jazz settings had become one of the principal contemporary representatives of an instrument that many listeners still associated with another era. The revival was not nostalgic. Cohen made the clarinet contemporary precisely by refusing to imprison it inside its own history.
Brazil as a Musical Home
Brazil eventually became much more than one influence among many. Cohen’s relationship with choro expanded into a broader engagement with samba, bossa nova and Brazilian composition, and her collaborations increasingly demonstrated fluency rather than stylistic tourism. The 2015 album Luminosa provides a particularly revealing map of that relationship. Its repertoire includes Milton Nascimento’s “Lilia” and “Cais,” Edu Lobo and Chico Buarque’s “Beatriz,” and pieces connected to the choro tradition, alongside Cohen’s own compositions. Brazilian musicians including Romero Lubambo, Vitor Gonçalves, Cesar Garabini, Sergio Krakowski and Gilmar Gomes appear in the album’s varied settings. Cohen herself described the Portuguese word luminosa as an image for the feeling music created in her life, explicitly connecting that joy with playing choro among friends.
One composition on Luminosa is especially important for understanding the chronology that the earlier Jazz Latitude article confused: “Happy Song.” It first appeared there in 2015 as a Cohen composition. Two years later, its name became the title of the debut recording by the Anat Cohen Tentet. The album Happy Song was released on October 6, 2017, after being recorded at Avatar Studios in New York in August 2016. It featured Cohen on clarinet with a ten-piece ensemble under the musical direction of Oded Lev-Ari, whose arrangements helped create a setting capable of moving between intimate interaction and orchestral breadth. The ensemble included cello, trumpet and flugelhorn, trombone, baritone saxophone and bass clarinet, vibraphone and percussion, piano and accordion, guitar, bass and drums. The date matters because it changes the story: Happy Song is not a mysterious 2007 artifact but a mature statement from 2017, emerging after more than a decade in which Cohen had steadily expanded the vocabulary surrounding her clarinet.
That distinction also points toward the deeper importance of the Tentet. Cohen had already proved that the clarinet could move naturally among jazz and Brazilian traditions. With Happy Song, the question became larger: could an ensemble itself be designed around the same openness? Instead of forcing disparate traditions into a concept, Cohen and Lev-Ari built a group flexible enough to let those traditions coexist through arrangement, improvisation and collective personality. The answer would become one of the defining chapters of Cohen’s career—and the clearest demonstration that her music was never really about crossing borders. It was about reaching the point where those borders no longer determined what the music was allowed to become.
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Happy Song: Building an Orchestra Around the Clarinet
By the time Anat Cohen assembled the Tentet, the central question of her career was no longer whether the clarinet could belong in contemporary jazz. She had already answered that through years of recordings, touring and collaborations. The more interesting question was what kind of musical world could be built around the instrument once historical expectations were removed. The Anat Cohen Tentet offered an unusually ambitious answer. Rather than place Cohen in front of a conventional large ensemble, the group was conceived as a flexible chamber orchestra whose unusual instrumentation could expand or contract around the music. The 2017 album Happy Song became the Tentet’s recorded introduction, but its significance lies less in scale than in architecture. Cohen and arranger-musical director Oded Lev-Ari created an ensemble capable of moving between written detail and improvisational freedom, between jazz orchestration and Brazilian rhythmic language, and between the intimacy of a small group and the breadth of a much larger band. The result did not abandon the cosmopolitan identity Cohen had developed during the previous decade. It gave that identity a new physical form.
From Luminosa to the Tentet
The title itself provides a useful bridge between phases of Cohen’s work. “Happy Song” had already appeared as one of her compositions on Luminosa in 2015. When it became the title track of the Tentet album two years later, the piece entered a different environment. The transformation illustrates something essential about Cohen’s approach to composition: a tune is not necessarily a fixed object. Its identity can change according to instrumentation, arrangement and the personalities surrounding it. In the Tentet, material could be redistributed across brass, reeds, strings, keyboards, guitar and rhythm section, allowing a melodic idea that had once existed in a smaller setting to acquire contrapuntal layers and new rhythmic perspectives. The 2017 recording was therefore not simply a larger-band sequel to Luminosa. It represented a different way of thinking about ensemble music, one in which orchestration became part of the improvisational imagination rather than a frame imposed around it.
Oded Lev-Ari was crucial to making that possible. Cohen and Lev-Ari shared roots in Israel and a long musical relationship, and his role went far beyond supplying background arrangements for a featured soloist. As musical director, arranger and producer, he helped construct the Tentet’s vocabulary from the inside. The instrumentation itself reveals the breadth of the palette: clarinet at the center, surrounded by trumpet and flugelhorn, trombone, baritone saxophone and bass clarinet, cello, vibraphone and percussion, piano and accordion, guitar, bass and drums. That combination avoids the standardized sectional logic of a traditional big band. A cello can merge with the clarinet or provide a contrasting line; accordion can introduce a completely different cultural association without changing the ensemble’s fundamental identity; vibraphone can function rhythmically, harmonically or as a source of luminous punctuation. Low reeds and brass provide weight without requiring a conventional saxophone section, while guitar and piano can alternate between harmonic support and independent voices. Cohen’s clarinet consequently does not need to dominate every passage. It can enter and leave the texture as one character among many.
That arrangement of forces also reflects Cohen’s larger musical philosophy. Her career had been built through encounters rather than through stylistic isolation, and the Tentet institutionalized that principle. Jazz remained the fundamental language of improvisational interaction, but it was no longer necessary for every rhythm, color or melodic gesture to announce itself as “jazz” in a narrow sense. Brazilian music could shape the underlying movement of a piece. Chamber-music transparency could influence the spacing of voices. Middle Eastern or Mediterranean inflections could enter a phrase without becoming an exotic effect. The group could move toward swing, contemporary composition or popular melody without treating those movements as departures from its identity. In that respect, the Tentet was less a fusion project than a portrait of how Cohen actually heard music after decades of absorbing different traditions.
Arrangement as Conversation
Large ensembles create a particular challenge for improvisers. The more precisely music is orchestrated, the easier it can become for spontaneity to feel compartmentalized: ensemble passages occur, then the arrangement makes room for a solo, then the written material returns. Happy Song works toward a more porous relationship. Lev-Ari’s arrangements frequently treat the ensemble as an active participant in the improvisational drama. Background figures can develop their own momentum, countermelodies can redirect attention, and instrumental combinations change the apparent size of the group from moment to moment. The effect is important because Cohen’s strongest playing has always depended on interaction. Surrounding her with ten musicians would have been pointless if the ensemble merely amplified her. Instead, the Tentet creates situations to which she must respond.
The repertoire reinforces that openness. Alongside Cohen’s compositions, Happy Song includes music by Gordon Jenkins, Brazilian composer Egberto Gismonti and Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona, as well as Lev-Ari’s own writing. Such a program could easily have become a demonstration of eclectic taste. Cohen and Lev-Ari avoid that problem by making arrangement the unifying language. Gismonti’s “Loro,” for example, enters a musical universe in which Brazilian rhythmic sophistication and jazz improvisation already share common ground. Lecuona’s “La Comparsa” carries a different historical and geographic identity, yet the Tentet does not need to disguise its origins to make it belong. Gordon Jenkins’s “Goodbye,” meanwhile, brings the ensemble into contact with the American song tradition. The connective tissue is not genre but the group’s way of listening, voicing and transforming material.
This is where Cohen’s experience with choro becomes especially relevant. Choro had taught her that elaborate melodic writing and improvisational freedom do not have to oppose one another. The music depends on detailed knowledge, rhythmic precision and collective responsiveness at the same time. Those values transfer naturally to a project such as the Tentet even when the repertoire is not explicitly Brazilian. A written line can feel alive because the musicians understand its rhythmic character; an arrangement can be intricate without becoming stiff because the ensemble treats phrasing as a shared responsibility. Cohen’s clarinet thrives in this environment. Its ability to articulate rapid passages allows it to participate in complex ensemble writing, while its vocal flexibility prevents those passages from sounding purely mechanical.
The distinction is central to understanding Cohen as a virtuoso. Technical command is obvious in her playing, but speed alone explains very little. Her virtuosity is primarily relational. She can alter articulation to match another instrument, shift the weight of a phrase against the rhythm section, exaggerate a bend for expressive effect, or move rapidly through the clarinet’s registers without breaking the narrative of a melody. This makes her particularly effective in music where written and improvised materials constantly interact. A less flexible soloist might sound as though the arrangement pauses whenever improvisation begins. Cohen can make the solo feel like another stage in the arrangement’s development.
The Clarinet Without Nostalgia
The Tentet also clarifies why Cohen’s contribution to the modern clarinet cannot be reduced to revivalism. Jazz history inevitably follows her instrument into the room. The clarinet carries associations with New Orleans ensemble playing, swing-era orchestras, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and generations of traditional-jazz musicians. Cohen has never needed to reject those associations. What she rejects, implicitly, is the idea that honoring history requires reproducing its boundaries. Her clarinet can swing with unmistakable authority, but it can also float above Brazilian rhythm, negotiate asymmetrical phrases, enter chamber textures or approach a melody with an almost singer-like fragility. The continuity with earlier clarinet traditions lies in expressiveness and improvisational identity, not in recreating their period style.
That approach places Cohen within a broader pattern in contemporary jazz. Many musicians of her generation came of age after the arguments about whether jazz should preserve tradition or embrace outside influences had already become inadequate. For an Israeli musician studying in Boston, living in New York and spending substantial time immersed in Brazilian culture, musical pluralism was not a theoretical position. It described everyday experience. Cohen’s work is particularly persuasive because she does not flatten those traditions into a generic international style. Choro still requires its particular rhythmic understanding. Brazilian repertoire retains its compositional character. American jazz standards carry their own histories. What changes is the assumption that a musician must choose only one of those histories as the foundation of an authentic identity.
Her relationship with Brazil is perhaps the strongest evidence. Cohen did not encounter Brazilian music through a single famous bossa nova album and then adopt its surface gestures. She played with Brazilian musicians, traveled repeatedly to the country, learned repertoire and developed relationships with players for whom those traditions were lived musical languages. Choro became particularly important because its combination of melodic sophistication, rhythmic elasticity and instrumental dialogue aligned naturally with qualities already emerging in her musicianship. Over time, Brazil ceased to function as an “influence” that could be separated from the rest of her work. It became one of the environments through which she understood improvisation itself.
A Different Kind of Global Jazz
The phrase “global jazz” is often used so broadly that it can obscure more than it explains. Cohen’s career offers a more useful model. Globalism in her music is not the accumulation of recognizable cultural markers. It is the consequence of sustained relationships. Israel contributed the musical environment in which her ears were formed. Berklee placed her among musicians from Latin America and elsewhere. New York provided a dense network of scenes in which those relationships could continue. Brazil gave her a profound second musical vocabulary. Jazz supplied an improvisational method capable of allowing all those experiences to remain active rather than being reduced to a single style.
Happy Song crystallized that model. Released in 2017, the album announced that Cohen’s transnational language could sustain not only a solo career but an ensemble with its own identity. The Tentet was large enough to accommodate orchestral imagination yet small enough to preserve individual personalities. Its arrangements could be sophisticated without eliminating risk, and its repertoire could cross geographic boundaries without becoming a catalogue of cultural references. Most importantly, the group shifted attention away from the question that had followed Cohen during her rise—how had a clarinetist brought this supposedly old-fashioned instrument back into modern jazz?—toward a much more interesting question: what could she now build with it?
The answer would continue to develop after Happy Song. The Tentet was not conceived as a one-album experiment, and Cohen’s subsequent work would demonstrate how much room remained inside its unusual instrumentation. At the same time, other projects would take her back toward the intimacy of Brazilian guitar and clarinet, revealing that expansion did not necessarily mean increasing the number of musicians. Cohen could move from ten-piece orchestration to the exposed dialogue of a duo without changing the fundamental values of her music. In both settings, the objective remained conversation: to listen closely enough that different histories could meet without losing their individual voices.
That ability ultimately explains why Happy Song occupies such an important position in Cohen’s career. It captures the moment when years of movement between countries, ensembles and traditions became an orchestral language. The clarinet that had once seemed historically constrained now stood at the center of music that could travel almost anywhere. Yet Cohen’s achievement was not simply to prove the instrument’s versatility. She had begun to show that the most meaningful form of musical cosmopolitanism does not erase origins. It creates a space large enough for them to speak to one another.
Beyond Borders: Anat Cohen and the Art of Musical Belonging
The success of the Anat Cohen Tentet did not lead Cohen toward a single grand format. If anything, it confirmed a principle that had guided her from the beginning: the size of an ensemble matters less than the quality of the conversation inside it. A ten-piece group could offer orchestral color, contrapuntal complexity and sudden changes of scale, but the same musical curiosity could be revealed through the opposite situation, where the clarinet stood almost completely exposed. Cohen’s subsequent work has repeatedly moved between these poles. The Tentet continued to evolve, while her Brazilian collaborations increasingly demonstrated how deeply that music had entered her vocabulary. Looking across her career, the most revealing pattern is not a progression from small ensembles to larger ones, or from jazz toward “world music.” It is the refusal to establish a hierarchy among those settings. Cohen can treat a Brazilian melody with the seriousness another musician might reserve for a canonical jazz standard, approach a swing tune without turning it into historical reenactment, or place the clarinet inside elaborate contemporary orchestration without making virtuosity the subject of the performance. Her career has become an argument for musical belonging based on knowledge, affection and sustained participation rather than birthplace.
The Intimacy of Outra Coisa
One of the clearest demonstrations came through Cohen’s partnership with Brazilian guitarist Marcello Gonçalves. Their album Outra Coisa: The Music of Moacir Santos, released in 2021, reduced the musical environment to clarinet and seven-string guitar while taking on compositions by one of the most sophisticated figures in Brazilian music. Santos, born in Pernambuco in 1926, became an influential composer, arranger, multi-instrumentalist and teacher whose work connected Brazilian rhythmic traditions with unusually rich harmonic and orchestral thinking. His 1965 album Coisas eventually came to be regarded as a landmark of Brazilian instrumental music. Cohen and Gonçalves did not attempt to reproduce Santos’s original arrangements. Their project asked what would remain when music associated with layered ensemble writing was distilled into a dialogue between two musicians. The answer depended not on simplification but on redistributing the original complexity between clarinet and guitar.
For Cohen, such a setting represented a different test from the Tentet. There was nowhere for the clarinet to disappear inside a large texture. Every entrance mattered; every held note, articulation and rhythmic displacement became part of an exposed exchange with Gonçalves. The Brazilian seven-string guitar is particularly suited to that dialogue because it can function simultaneously as harmonic foundation, rhythmic engine and contrapuntal voice. Gonçalves could imply several layers of an arrangement while leaving enough space for Cohen to phrase with freedom. Cohen, in turn, did not need to imitate Brazilian instrumentalists in order to sound connected to the repertoire. Decades of playing choro and other Brazilian forms had given her an understanding of how melody sits against rhythm, how ornamentation can intensify rather than obscure a line, and how elasticity in phrasing can coexist with a strong underlying pulse.
This is where the depth of her Brazilian relationship becomes unmistakable. Cultural exchange in jazz has sometimes been framed as a matter of borrowing sounds: a rhythm is imported, an instrument added, or a familiar composition rearranged with an “international” flavor. Cohen’s work increasingly moved in the opposite direction. She entered musical communities long enough for their practices to affect how she listened and responded. When she performs Brazilian music, the most convincing evidence of that engagement is often not an obvious stylistic gesture but timing: the way a phrase leans into a rhythmic pattern, the patience with which a melody is allowed to unfold, or the ease with which written material can become conversational.
The partnership with Gonçalves consequently belongs to the same artistic story as the Tentet despite sounding radically different. Both require Cohen to understand arrangement as something alive. In the Tentet, that means negotiating a carefully designed network of instrumental colors. In a duo, it means hearing orchestral possibilities inside two instruments. Both settings reject the assumption that complexity is proportional to volume or ensemble size. Cohen’s career repeatedly demonstrates that musical density can arise from the number of relationships inside a performance rather than simply the number of musicians onstage.
The Tentet Keeps Moving
The Tentet itself continued beyond Happy Song. Its second album, Triple Helix, released in 2019, expanded the collaboration between Cohen and Oded Lev-Ari and further established the ensemble as a continuing creative unit rather than a special project assembled around one recording. The title composition was conceived as a substantial multi-part work, allowing Cohen and Lev-Ari to think beyond the conventional sequence of independent tunes. That larger architecture suited an ensemble whose identity already depended on unusual combinations of instrumental voices. Rather than simply revisiting the exuberance of Happy Song, the project demonstrated that the Tentet could sustain longer forms and more explicitly compositional development while preserving space for improvisation.
The evolution continued with The Fanfare of Light in 2024. By then the Tentet had accumulated something essential that cannot be written into an arrangement: history as a working band. An ensemble becomes different after musicians have spent years learning one another’s tendencies. Written passages acquire greater flexibility because the players know where the music can breathe. Soloists understand how the ensemble is likely to respond. Arrangements that might initially require concentration begin to function as shared language. For a musician as interaction-oriented as Cohen, that development is particularly valuable. The Tentet’s importance is therefore not merely that it surrounds her clarinet with unusual instrumentation. It creates a long-term community capable of developing its own instincts.
That idea of community connects the project to the most durable traditions in jazz. Many of the music’s great ensembles became significant not simply because they gathered talented individuals, but because those individuals remained together long enough to produce a collective identity. Cohen’s Tentet belongs to a different historical and stylistic moment from the classic small groups or big bands of earlier decades, yet the underlying principle remains recognizable. Improvisation becomes richer when musicians share memory. A phrase can refer implicitly to something that happened on another night. An arrangement can become less fixed because everyone understands its structure deeply enough to take risks inside it. The band itself becomes part of the composition.
For Cohen, this represents another stage in the transformation of the clarinet’s role. In the early years of her career, much attention understandably focused on the novelty of hearing a young contemporary jazz musician make the instrument central again. With the Tentet established, the clarinet no longer needs defending. It simply functions. Cohen can lead, accompany, disappear into a texture, emerge with a solo or blend with instruments whose timbres create entirely new combinations. The historical question—whether the clarinet still belongs in modern jazz—has become irrelevant because the music has moved far beyond it.
The Cohen Family and the Meaning of Dialogue
Another essential strand of Cohen’s musical identity can be heard with her brothers Avishai and Yuval in the family ensemble 3 Cohens. The group makes literal something that is already present throughout her career: music as conversation shaped by shared history. Anat on clarinet and saxophones, Avishai on trumpet and Yuval on saxophones possess individual careers and distinctive artistic identities, yet their family connection creates a particular kind of musical familiarity. They grew up listening together, developing within overlapping environments before pursuing separate paths. When they reunite, the result is not simply three accomplished Israeli jazz musicians placed in one band. Their phrasing can carry the intuitive recognition that develops through years of knowing how another person thinks.
Family ensembles can easily be romanticized, but the importance of 3 Cohens is musical rather than sentimental. Jazz requires rapid decisions. A musician hears a phrase and responds before there is time to analyze it fully. Shared experience can make those responses unusually immediate, but only if the players have also developed strong individual voices. The Cohens have. Avishai’s trajectory as a trumpeter and composer, Yuval’s work as a saxophonist and educator, and Anat’s increasingly clarinet-centered international career mean that reunions occur after each musician has accumulated new experiences elsewhere. The family conversation is therefore continually renewed.
That pattern resembles Cohen’s relationship with musical traditions more broadly. She values familiarity, but not stasis. Returning to Brazil does not mean repeating the same Brazilian project. Returning to the Tentet does not mean reproducing Happy Song. Returning to her siblings does not mean recreating childhood. Every return contains whatever has happened since the previous encounter. Her artistic identity is cumulative.
What Anat Cohen Changed
It is tempting to summarize Cohen’s achievement by saying that she helped restore the clarinet to contemporary jazz prominence. That is true, but it is incomplete. An instrument does not require rescue simply because fashions change. The more consequential achievement is that Cohen loosened the assumptions surrounding what a modern jazz clarinetist could represent. Her work connects the instrument’s long jazz history to a musical world in which nationality, repertoire and ensemble format are increasingly fluid. She did not accomplish that by disguising the clarinet as something else. Its woody lower register, penetrating upper range, capacity for rapid articulation and extraordinary resemblance to the human voice remain central to her identity. What changed was the landscape around it.
Her influence is therefore as conceptual as it is instrumental. Cohen demonstrates that deep engagement with several traditions does not necessarily weaken artistic identity. The opposite can happen. The more clearly a musician understands what she values—melody, rhythmic interaction, expressive freedom, collective listening—the more easily those values can survive changes of context. Cohen sounds recognizably herself in Brazilian repertoire, straight-ahead jazz, large-ensemble writing and intimate chamber settings because identity in her music resides primarily in the way she listens and phrases, not in a fixed collection of stylistic markers.
This helps explain why the word “transnational” is useful for her career only if it describes movement rather than marketing. Cohen’s music does not present Israel, the United States and Brazil as ingredients in a formula. Those places represent experiences, relationships and periods of learning. Tel Aviv provided an early environment of musical plurality. Boston and Berklee opened pathways into jazz and Latin American traditions. New York offered a community in which multiple musical identities could coexist professionally. Brazil became a second artistic home through repeated engagement with musicians and repertoire. Each location altered the next.
The result is particularly relevant to contemporary jazz because the music itself has become increasingly international. Jazz has long traveled beyond the United States, but the twenty-first century has produced generations of musicians for whom international circulation is not a secondary chapter in the story—it is the environment in which their musical identities were formed. Cohen stands prominently among them. She respects the African American history at the foundation of jazz while recognizing that participation in the music creates new dialogues wherever musicians engage with it seriously. Her work does not claim that all traditions are interchangeable. It demonstrates how they can communicate without surrendering their particular character.
The Joy Behind the Complexity
For all the sophistication surrounding Cohen’s music, one quality is easy to overlook: joy. The title Happy Song was not accidental, nor was Luminosa. Cohen’s performances often contain an unmistakable pleasure in interaction. Even technically demanding passages can feel playful rather than severe. A clarinet phrase may suddenly leap upward, a rhythmic idea may be answered with a grin-like flourish, or an ensemble passage may gather momentum until complexity becomes exuberance. This does not mean the music lacks introspection. Cohen can play with extraordinary tenderness and restraint. But joy remains one of her most distinctive expressive resources.
That quality helps prevent her cosmopolitanism from becoming academic. The listener does not need to identify the genealogy of every rhythm or understand the technical construction of an arrangement to feel the communication taking place. Scholarship and preparation exist behind the performance, but they are converted into immediacy. Cohen’s command of the clarinet works similarly. Years of technical discipline allow her to make difficult gestures sound spontaneous. The technique disappears into expression.
This may ultimately be the strongest connection between her work in choro and jazz. Both traditions place extraordinary demands on musicians while valuing the sensation that music is being invented in real time. Preparation creates freedom. Knowledge makes play possible. Cohen has built a career around that paradox.
From Tel Aviv to Boston, from New York clubs to Brazilian rodas de choro, from the exposed intimacy of clarinet and guitar to the layered architecture of the Tentet, Anat Cohen has followed an unusually consistent principle: music becomes richer when listening is stronger than borders. The clarinet was once the instrument through which critics noticed her difference. It has since become something more important—a voice capable of carrying all the places, friendships and traditions that shaped her without reducing any of them to ornament.
That is why Cohen’s significance reaches beyond the revival of a particular instrument. She represents a model of contemporary musicianship in which curiosity is disciplined by respect, virtuosity serves communication and tradition becomes a foundation for encounters rather than a wall against them. The clarinet that once seemed inseparable from jazz’s past has, in her hands, become a persuasive voice for its international present. And perhaps the most remarkable aspect of that transformation is how natural she has made it sound.