(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: First of all, I promise we'll spend most of our conversation talking about Bloom, but I feel like it would be a disservice to listeners to not ask you about growing up in a musical family, and what specifically drew you to the clarinet and saxophone, given the wide range of instruments available.
Anat Cohen: All right, well, we're jumping right in! (laughter)
Lawrence: Yes, we are.
Anat: Let me tell you about growing up in a musical family. My two brothers are musicians, my mother taught music to children in kindergarten—starting as a hobby that became her profession. My father loves music and knows so much about it, but never had the chance to study an instrument, even though he really wanted to.
There's appreciation for music, there is love and respect for it. And we had parents who let their three children pursue their passion. "Oh, you like music? You want to take lessons? We'll drive you. We'll pay for lessons. We'll be there. We'll come to the concerts." Even with three concerts a week, they were there for all of them.
That's what we did growing up. Sometimes people ask me about my path, whether I chose music, and how I knew I wanted to play the clarinet. I didn't pause to think about those things much because that's what we did. It was a whole household production—twice a week going to school and straight to the conservatory, leaving the house at 7 AM, coming back at 9:30 or 10 PM. My mother would make eighteen sandwiches (laughter) for each of us: one for breakfast, one for lunch, one with schnitzel.
It takes support from family and parents. I don't know if I would have continued without supportive parents and two brothers who were doing it too. We all went to similar paths: same junior high school for the arts, same high school for the arts, same conservatory, same after-school program, same band, same youth orchestra, same musical New Orleans Dixieland band, same big band.
Now as an adult, I'm thinking, "Well, for parents, it's a dream." They just drop off their three children at three o'clock at the conservatory and pick them up at 8:30. They can go do whatever they want two, three times a week. It was my life, my daily routine, what I studied in school. It was my social life—the friends who were playing music, my brothers playing music.
When you're young and your siblings are playing, you don't always stop to appreciate that your siblings are also musicians. With a year and a half difference or three years between siblings, you think, "They have their own friends, their own way of doing things." You don't really unite until later in life. The three of us ended up attending the same college. We all flew to the other side of the ocean from Tel Aviv, where we grew up. We had scholarships and went to study at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Now in 2024, they are wonderful musicians and wonderful people. They carry dedication, seriousness, and integrity. They are who I go to for discussions about life, advice, personal growth, meditation, running, music, chord changes, teaching, and education. To answer your question about what it means to grow up in a musical family—it's a blessing.
Lawrence: Do you have any sense if they were here, or if I were to sit down with them and say, "What have you learned from your sister?" Do you have an awareness of what they might say?
Anat: Oh gosh, that's a very good question. I think our performance style... You know, we are very different. Once we decided to make a group—because we have a family group called the Three Cohens, or as my father liked to call it and wanted us to call it, "Three Cohens in the Fountain"—but we didn't go for it.
Lawrence: Pretty literal. (laughter)
Anat: Thank you, I'll be here all night! At some point, we decided we have something really in common. We grew up with the same teachers and influences. When we play, we have the same DNA of paying attention to each other. It's something very natural. Inside the music, our individuality comes out and we accept each other. We learned how to let each other bloom.
In the intercommunication, it took a moment because you have your family habits. Being born in a country where if you don't like something, you'll say, "No, don't do that," instead of what you might want to think about differently. That can be a little bit intimidating for the side musicians who work with us. We had to learn how to work with each other, communicate professionally, and how to be on stage.
I have a nature to dance and smile and be energetic, while they're both much more serious. When you ask what they maybe learned from me, I would think that in performance, even if they don't necessarily apply it, it's the idea that the seriousness of this art we're doing doesn't mean we have to have a sad face and be serious. You can also be smiling and uplifting. So I'm hoping that would be their answer.
Lawrence: Yeah, we'll find out at some point. (laughter) Do you know if an affinity or connection with music goes back even further past your mom's generation? Is there a longer lineage?
Anat: Oh, definitely. Especially my mother's family—her last name is Pearl, and that family always got together and sang. They came from more conservative roots, always getting together on Friday night with everybody singing. When my mother starts to sing any of those old Yiddish songs, the tears immediately start to flow, and there are a lot of memories. Those melodies definitely come from before.
Lawrence: The melodies in Israeli folk music or Eastern European music, anything that goes through klezmer—those melodies are just... there's something very ancient and very connective. It's very powerful, very primal. It's fascinating.
Anat: Yeah, many times they sound like lullabies that you just sing and hum together, and everybody sings together. It's very cantor-like—very expressive, and there's a lot of individuality in each person who sings. I think that's very influential when you're a horn player. My two brothers and I are all horn players—Avishai plays trumpet, Yuval plays soprano saxophone, and I play primarily the clarinet now. You want to carry a melody the way you hear it—it has to be meaningful, expressive, and have the nuances that express your feelings and make something of the moment. It's not just notes. I think all of that is inherited in our DNA.
Lawrence: There's something about the clarinet as well, that—the way clarinet handles melody is just so... I don't know, I don't have the vocabulary even to articulate it, except that there's something about the clarinet's ability to embrace and to drive and to ride a melody that is so unique. It's such a beautiful sound.
Anat: I agree. The clarinet has one thing that I love about it—it has a really wide range. You can decide to take a melody and play it in the chalumeau mode in the really low register and kind of whisper it. And you can also decide to take it up almost two octaves and play it all the way high and scream it as loud as you want above any other band members.
That's something that I love and utilize in my professional life. I have my Tentett and projects with big bands, and there's something about the clarinet that can carry a whole orchestra with this intensity of sound right above the band. And yet it can be hiding inside and just creating a vibe. It has those possibilities that not every instrument has—this wide range of choice. I love the soprano saxophone, but you can't go below a certain note, so you're limited.
Lawrence: If you were to pick up a saxophone today, which one would you go for? Would you not lean towards a soprano? Would you want an alto or tenor?
Anat: Well, I play all of them. I've recorded all of them. For many years, I focused on the tenor saxophone because they needed that in the school's big band. Then I listened to Coltrane playing "Big Nick" and I was like, "Oh my God, I love the sound of the soprano saxophone. I've got to play soprano saxophone."
I was a student in Boston, and I was just fascinated by the sound. The same night I was playing a gig at the Regatta Bar in Boston, and this guy, David Ortega, came by. We talked about the soprano, and he was a soprano saxophone player. I said, "Wow, I fell in love. Just want to play soprano." He said, "I have a soprano I don't use. If you want, I can lend it to you." He showed up at my next gig and just gave me the soprano. He said, "One day when you have money, you can buy it." That was my affair with the soprano saxophone that lasted until today. Thank you, David, if you hear that forever.
I also play alto saxophone. The baritone saxophone I did not really get to, and now I play clarinet and bass clarinet. Really, who dictates which instruments I play is TSA more than anything. (laughter)
Lawrence: It took me a second. I was like, TSA, is that some kind of musician thing? Yes, it is. The dreaded TSA.
Anat: Right, because you want to go on an airplane, you're like, wait, you can only get a certain amount of carry-ons, and the instrument is too expensive—I'm not going to send them in the airplane cargo. So if I want to play bass clarinet and tenor saxophone and clarinet, then I have to make some choices.
Lawrence: Aren't you just glad you're not a double bass player?
Anat: Yeah, those days for the double bass players are over. They cannot—they have to get a bass wherever they go. The airlines won't even take those basses anymore. For a while, I remember we were touring and there was a website called rentabass.com where musicians could find other bass players that rent their basses. I'm glad I'm on the clarinet. It fits in my backpack.
Lawrence: Yeah, worst comes to worst, pack a flute.
Anat: Exactly. Well, my friend David Ofri is a tuba player. Whenever he walks around with a tuba, people say, "Well, I'm just sorry you didn't pick up the piccolo." And he said, "Well, then I'll have to carry the tuba and the piccolo." (laughter)
Lawrence: I'm really curious about the musical palette of Quartetinho. If one enjoys the music at a surface level and maybe doesn't read anything or just has the music on, they may not capture the full breadth of the different influences in that music. It's not simply Brazilian music or South American music. It seems like it's uniquely your take on that music, bringing your heritage and learning and background to it in a way that most musicians do, but oftentimes when a musician performs in a different cultural idiom, the idiom subsumes the musician as opposed to the musician making their mark on it. That's what I hear in your sound. I wonder if you could talk about the role of intention in this music that you've created and composed specifically for this ensemble.
Anat: Wow, there's a lot to discuss. Quartetinho—first of all, the name of the band has the Brazilian flavor because Quartetinho means "little quartet." That was the name we chose at the time when we were all playing with the Tentet, because I have a ten-piece band called the Tentet and we are all members of it.
One of the band members is Brazilian, Vitor Gonçalves, an amazing carioca accordion and piano player. We all love the music of Brazil. We have another Israeli in the band, Tal Mashiach, who plays bass and seven-string guitar. And we have Maryland-born James Shipp playing percussion and vibraphone. Somehow, we all have a big affinity for the music of Brazil, and our first album indeed has a few Brazilian pieces because we love it and it connects us.
This second album that we released called Bloom really doesn't have any Brazilian songs on it. This band is collaborative—we bring ideas, original music that might have Brazilian influence, but it might also have Thelonious Monk and every person's own influences. I really try to make the way we work together very open. When we have time to be in the same town and get together to rehearse and work on music, like we did preparing to record this album, it's very collaborative.
We're multi-instrumentalists, so first we have to choose which instruments to play. Should we play piano, bass, percussion, and clarinet? Or should we play accordion, guitar, vibraphone, and bass clarinet? It will be a whole other sound for the band. We get to experiment and try things. We discuss together the space within the music, the accompaniment, how we talk a lot about orchestration on each person's instrument and how it supports the band sound.
In Bloom, there is a tango, there is a classical piece by a Uruguayan composer, Agustín Barrios, called "La Catedral." There is Thelonious Monk. There is a song tribute to the great Paco de Lucía called "Paco" that Tal wrote. There's my song that is kind of six-eight Afro-Cuban but travels through many influences. There's James's song "Superheroes in the Gig Economy"—it's folkloric, American roots. Everybody brings their influence and we try to respect their vision and what they're hearing and find who we are inside the music.
As a band leader, I want people to be comfortable. You rehearse, you play, and once you reach a place where everybody finds their spot, you just let them keep experimenting and keep growing and keep changing. We just got back from a three-week tour in Europe and the music kept changing—the same songs, but the last concert sounded almost nothing like the first concert. That's the beauty of jazz and people who are researchers and experimental. It's a wonderful thing.
Lawrence: Do you remember what your on-ramp was to Brazilian music? What first drew you to it? Was it a composer? Was it an album? Was it a song?
Anat: Officially I fell in love with Brazilian music when I was living in Boston. I started to play with Brazilian musicians who, like me, came to Berklee College of Music to study jazz. When people are away from home, they start missing home and wanting to play songs from their childhood and songs they love from their own country. I ended up playing Brazilian music with Brazilian people in Boston.
Then I realized, "Wait a second, this is not a Brazilian song. This is an Israeli song." And they're like, "No way. This is a Brazilian song." I realized that I grew up hearing a lot of Brazilian music, but since it had Hebrew lyrics, I thought it was Israeli music. I didn't even realize that there were people like Matti Caspi and Yehudit Ravitz who brought musicians from Brazil, translated whole albums of "País Tropical" and Jorge Ben, and created Israeli versions with the same lyrics but with the same grooves and feel. The lyrics are in a different language.
So I grew up listening to some of this music and years later, I realized, "Wow, I feel at home with this music, something very natural." I had to pursue it. I had to go after it. At the end of 2000, I went to Brazil for the first time in my life. I didn't have any gigs—I just knew a couple of people. I bought a ticket for two months and everybody's like, "But what about your gigs? What about—" And I was like, "It's gonna wait. I feel like I need to go. I need to feel what it is."
I traveled inside Brazil. I spent a lot of time in Rio de Janeiro. I met a lot of musicians. I got inside choro music. I was traveling with the clarinet, even though at the time I was still focusing on the saxophone. I became a clarinet player because of Brazilian music and Brazilian choro music that became a big part of my life. My whole attitude toward music changed, my whole understanding of how music belongs to the people, how people connect to it. It's not music that's just for the musicians to enjoy and for some people to sit far away and listen. It was just something so inclusive that it changed me as a musician.
Lawrence: Am I correct? I had a note here for myself. Am I correct that you're studying for a degree in Brazil?
Anat: Well, I did during the pandemic. During the pandemic, it was a time of "What are we gonna do? We'll never be on stage ever again. It's over." In my mind, I had already said goodbye. I was looking at airplanes from far away thinking, "How romantic—people are sitting and flying. Wonder what they're doing."
I was loving being a student. I was studying a lot of things while I was in quarantine. I picked up the cavaquinho, the Brazilian ukulele, and studied. I entered university to do my master's. I was taking composition classes, taking lectures online. I can tell you for sure, being a student online is a wonderful thing. I mean, if you're okay with not seeing people—if you're not in high school and need your buddies next to you—just for information and self-growth. Now, to be a teacher online, oof, that's very challenging. (laughter)
Lawrence: Did you do that?
Anat: I did, yeah. I teach at the New School and different workshops around the world—the Stanford Jazz Workshop, Centrum at the Shore Workshop, and there are a few things that I do yearly. I'm also faculty at the New School in New York, so we all became online teachers. It was interesting to experience the difference between being a student and being a teacher online. I went back to university to get my master's, which I am still working on.
Lawrence: Can you feel or recognize an impact in how it shaped your music?
Anat: It's hard to tell about shaping the music, but I think for all of us who suddenly had the ability to travel and be on stage taken away, I definitely learned to appreciate more the academic world. It's great if it's done with integrity and with people who are not bitter—it's a wonderful world of being able to give. Especially with people who are performers and can share their experience and inspire young people who hopefully one day can be out there and do the same.
Lawrence: It's really interesting that you make that allusion to some of the bitterness in academia. I talk to a lot of different artists, and it's interesting that there is oftentimes a tension between the education on the bandstand or in the artistic community—being such a big part of the jazz tradition, almost the oral tradition part of it—and that being such a big part of the jazz tradition versus the sort of learning about life on and off the bandstand that you get as a working musician. In academia, there's a really weird tension and kind of judgmentalism that goes back and forth a lot of times. I don't mean to overstate it or be overly broad, but I feel like it's something that comes up thematically a lot in my conversations.
Anat: You know, it's hard to generalize, of course, but it's hard to do both. It's hard to be a traveling musician spending most of your life on the road and performing, and also have a position in a university and be there a hundred percent for the students. Sometimes life makes you choose between one or the other, or you choose one or the other.
People who stay in one place and do it out of love and really want to make a difference—that's one thing. And people who stay and keep looking at the other people who are out there playing and become bitter about it or jealous—it's not a good environment because it can get toxic for the students. It's very personal, and we can't generalize. It's just about different individuals.
I was extremely lucky that on my path, I met so many inspiring educators or teachers. It's funny to say "educators" because I'm thinking sometimes about my teacher when I was a student in Boston—George Garzone was my saxophone teacher. I could just go every week and meet for a lesson, but I could also go every week and hear him play with The Fringe. I would get the energy for a whole week just by the way his sound is powerful, just seeing him performing. You say much less in the lesson, really.
Lawrence: Tell me a little bit about your take on Monk. You mentioned earlier that on Bloom, it was really a band record in terms of everybody contributed to compositions and arrangements and instrumentation orchestration. But of course, there was another songwriter named Monk who makes an appearance on the record. I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about it. There's sort of a reimagining in that piece, right? You change the time, and the quirkiness of time to me is something that I would immediately—if you said, give me three things about Monk, that would probably be the number one thing I'd say. So what are you up to? (laughter)
Anat: You know, I say it now because we performed this—I made an arrangement for "Trinkle Tinkle." From my history as a musician, even when I used to live in Boston and play with the Latin jazz scene, we would play every Thursday at Wally's, this little club in Boston. Monk would be one of the composers we'd play in Latin jazz. And I was like, "Oh wow, you can take Monk and play it that way."
Then other people in the Brazilian scene would play Monk their way, and I'd think, "Wow, Monk, no matter what you do with his songs—you can make it in four and five and seven and in different grooves—it always sounds like Monk." Something about his melodies allows you to mess with them and they don't lose their essence.
Lawrence: Is it the minimalism?
Anat: Maybe. I mean, specifically, "Trinkle Tinkle" is not that minimal. But it's very distinguished. So you can change the rhythm and it's still the melody. Maybe in that case, it's a lot of notes—maybe that's what makes it so distinguished. But maybe sometimes it is the minimalism. Like, you know, I think of "Bright Mississippi"—that's interesting. You can put so many different grooves underneath that.
My idea when I took the song was, "Wow, let me try and make an arrangement for Quartetinho where we get away from the swing." I didn't want to play four-four swing because that puts you in a certain headspace. So I kind of wanted to expand the bar a little bit and put it in three. I played with the rhythms, and it took a second for the band to get used to it because sometimes things that are obvious to me in my head, I learned, are not as obvious to other people. But eventually, it became one of our favorite pieces to play because the band is getting more and more swinging inside it. It ended up being a swing song anyway, even though I tried to get away from the swing. It just went back to become what it wanted to become, but I changed it from regular four-four to three-four, and James added a shout chorus based on Monk's improvisation, and that's the arrangement.
Lawrence: What does the album title mean to you?
Anat: Bloom? For me, it's—we almost wanted to call it "Full Bloom." It's about the process of the band because we got together to play as this band, we rehearsed for the first album, we did our first show on March 7th, 2020.
Lawrence: Oh, Jesus.
Anat: And then the world shut down.
Lawrence: I just did the math. (laughter)
Anat: Exactly. Then we got together over a few months and we rehearsed and prepared to become a band, and we were who we were back then. Then we didn't see each other for a year and a half, and then we recorded our first album. We got together after quarantine time and put out our first album two years ago. Then we did some shows and we matured and experimented and learned about each other. So Bloom for me—this album is much more like, "Oh, this is a whole other vision of the band." This is the way we are shining right now. We're opening and blooming with who we are in 2024.
Lawrence: One of the notes in your biography is that you were the first Israeli artist to headline at the Village Vanguard. Is that milestone important to you? When you talk to people where they're the first of something that has to do with their identity, the relationship people have with that milestone has such a range of reactions. Some people don't want to acknowledge it—they just say, "I am who I am," and somebody else has given them that identity and made that milestone important. Others might say, "I'm very happy to have been the first in such and such identity." Were you aware at the time and did it mean anything?
Anat: I think about it right now and it could be a PR phrase, but when I think about playing at the Vanguard, it has nothing to do with where I was born. I feel like I'm carrying a legacy of people—very few people play at the Vanguard because people play for a week, there's only fifty-four weeks, and some people play twice a year, so there's less than fifty-four people who play there every year.
Just the fact that I could headline at the Vanguard a bunch of times with various different projects—with my band, with my Anzic Orchestra, with Live at the Vanguard playing with Benny Green, Lewis Nash, and Peter Washington, playing with my quartet a few times, headlining with my brothers, the Three Cohens Sextet. It's such an honor. At this point, I'm like, "Wow, I played the Vanguard, I headlined at the Vanguard." It doesn't matter to me who I was at the time and what number—I'm proud to be part of such an important legacy in the jazz world.
The Village Vanguard is, up until today, my favorite place to sit and hear music because it sounds like the records, it sounds like jazz. When you sit at the bar and close your eyes, you are transformed to a different era when just the music exists. There's no bullshit, there's no food—you're just inside the music. It's such a privilege to be in the audience and of course on stage.
Lawrence: Every time I walk in there, I find myself—it takes me a little while to calm down inside because I realize like, everybody that Coltrane and Eric Dolphy played right there. (laughter) It's shocking. It's hard to—and your point about the sound of the place, like you listen to records from the Village Vanguard and they all sound like they were engineered and mastered by the same person. And it's like, no, the room did that. The room did that. It's really a mystical vibe.
Anat: It really is. That's why when you asked me this question, I'm like, "Wow, I don't even remember that phrase." For me, it's like, "Wow, I play—not only just headline at the Vanguard—I have an album Live at the Village Vanguard." It's like, what?
And I remember sitting with Lorraine Gordon at her spot where she would always sit—the late Max Gordon's wife and then the late Lorraine Gordon. And she was like, "Yeah, and Coltrane would come off the stage, he would walk here and then he would go"—and she points to where the men's room is—"and he would just keep practicing and playing and playing and playing."
It's kind of funny to have someone who has been witnessing all these guys being there, and when they were still flipping burgers in the kitchen of the Vanguard back then. It's really so much history. And when you play at the Vanguard, when you are on the stage, you feel they're watching—you can feel it, you feel the spirits, they are inside those walls. It's not just another gig. It's not like playing, "Ah, I have a gig tonight." No, no, no. Playing in the Vanguard comes with a lot of responsibility.
Lawrence: You notice the audience is different. Is it—I don't even know what to say. Is it—I was going to say, is it a smarter, hipper audience, but that doesn't capture what I'm going after. Can you tell a Vanguard audience?
Anat: Well, for me, when I say they are listening, I'm talking about the spirits of those who played there. But the audience—sometimes there are the regulars, the people that sit in the front and they've been there, sitting in the front for years. And sometimes there are people like, "Yeah, let's go hear some jazz" and they get some random tickets and show up.
But usually the Vanguard, since it's not known for its lovely hospitality—it's a place you go to hear music. You don't go there to just hang out and have a drink and chit chat. If you're not part of the game, you're out. So people usually don't come back if they didn't feel like they could just hang and talk to their friends.
Lawrence: It's funny you say that because when I think about going to the Vanguard, I can't remember ever talking. It's not to say that I feel stiff or uptight there, but it's where you go for music. It's not a club. It's so bizarre.
Anat: Yeah. If Lorraine was there, man, and you just made any wrong move—she would let you have it. (laughter)
Lawrence: I'm curious about a quote I read of yours that said "music is the only place where I feel completely safe." That's very profound. Could you talk about that? What's the notion of safety or a lack of safety?
Anat: Well, this has been changing. Right now, it's a whole other thing than what it was a year ago or a little over a year ago. Being a person meeting our own insecure demons or insecure part of ourselves or other demons that make us think about things we don't want to think about.
Improvised music is a safe place because you have to be a hundred percent focused in the moment and it's a conversation that nobody's gonna—obviously, and I'm at the point that I can choose who I play with—but people are not going to point at you and make fun of you. You suggest something and there's a conversation and somebody is responding politely or impolitely and you are having a discussion. You explore and search for new grounds and you accept and you listen.
Something like that is happening inside the music and inside the band and on the bandstand that is very hard to find this day and age in a regular conversation. People are either too afraid to say their opinion or too afraid to say their opinions, but either way, it's not safe to just say what you think anymore, because if you meet somebody with an opposite opinion, you're crossed and that's it. And especially if there's a few of them with the opposite opinion.
Inside music, you can be who you are. You can be vulnerable. You can be funny. You can be loving. You can be aggressive. Music reveals all areas of emotions and exposes you. And I like to play with people that I feel safe with, that I can be vulnerable and they're going to accept that.
