Anat Cohen

Anat Cohen has won hearts and minds the world over with her expressive virtuosity and delightful stage presence. Anat has been voted Clarinetist of the Year six years in a row by the Jazz Journalists Association, as well as 2012’s Multi-Reeds Player of the Year. That’s not to mention her topping of critics and readers polls in DownBeat magazine several years running. Anat has toured the world with her quartet, headlining at the Newport, Umbria, SF Jazz, and North Sea jazz festivals as well as at such hallowed clubs as New York’s Village Vanguard. In September 2012, her own Anzic Records released her sixth album as a bandleader, Claroscuro. The album ranges from buoyant dances to darkly lyrical ballads, drawing inspiration from New Orleans and New York, Africa, and Brazil. In its ebullient, irresistible variety, Claroscuro encapsulates the description Jazz Police offered of Anat in full flight: “She becomes a singer, a poet, a mad scientist, laughing – musically – with the delight of reaching that new place, that new feeling, with each chorus.”

Anat collaborates regularly with one of her heroes, Cuban-American clarinetist-saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera, who introduced her onstage at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in the Jazz at Lincoln Center complex as “one of the greatest players ever of the clarinet.” She plays with George Wein’s Newport All-Stars and is a fixture on the New York scene at such clubs as Birdland, starring in a recent tribute to the music of Django Reinhardt, among much else. Anat has also appeared in New York at the Jazz Standard, Blue Note, Iridium, Joe’s Pub, and the Jazz Gallery, as well as other top clubs across the country and around the world – Yoshi’s in San Francisco, Blues Alley in Washington, D.C., Regatta Bar in Boston, the Sunset in Paris, Bimhuis in Amsterdam, Jazzclub Fasching in Stockholm, A Trane in Berlin, and Zappa in Tel Aviv. She has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and Symphony Space in New York, along with Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center, Newark’s New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Boston’s Berklee Performance Center, the ORF-Kulturhaus in Vienna and Belgrade’s Kolarac Hall in Serbia. Anat has played the great jazz festivals the world over, including the JVC, Newport, Chicago, Monterey, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage, SF Jazz (San Francisco), Playboy (Los Angeles), Duke Ellington (Washington, D.C.), Montreal, Copenhagen, Jazz a Vienne, Umbria, North Sea (Netherlands), Tudo e Jazz (Brazil), Caesaria (Israel), and Zagreb Jazzarella festivals. Her performances have been broadcast internationally, including by WBGO, WFUV, WNYC, and NPR in the U.S. and Radio Netherlands, ORF (Austrian Radio), SR (Swedish Radio), and Radio Bremen (Germany).