Anat Cohen - Clarinetwork: Benny Goodman and Beyond

Multi-instrumentalist Anat Cohen brings her clarinet and her all-star quartet to the Village Vanguard for six nights. Anat will lead a tribute to Goodman celebrating the incomparable clarinetist's centennial year. Featuring Benny Green on piano, Peter Washington on bass, and Lewis Nash on drums.

Thursday-Saturday, Cohen adds five horn players to create a nonet reduction of Goodman's big band charts, arranged by Oded Lev-Ari.

Featuring:
Ted Nash, tenor saxophone
Dan Block, alto saxophone
Scott Robinson, baritone saxophone
Avishai Cohen, trumpet
Wycliffe Gordon, trombone

Originally from Tel-Aviv, Israel, Anat Cohen has been performing around the world sharing her astounding musicianship and becoming a major force on the global world music and jazz scene. Aside from her abilities on soprano and tenor saxophones, clarinet and flute, she has a natural ability to absorb the music of different cultures, process it and interpret it with her own special take.

An established bandleader and prolific composer, idiomatically conversant with modern and traditional jazz, classical music, Brazilian choro, Argentine tango, and an expansive timeline of Afro-Cuban styles, Anat Cohen has established herself as one of the primary voices of her generation on both the tenor saxophone and clarinet since arriving in New York in 1999.

In September 2008, Anat Cohen released Notes From The Village, her fourth album as a leader. Recorded at Avatar studios in New York City, the album builds on Cohen's acclaimed 2007 releases, captures the thrilling energy of her live shows, and proves her to be an artistically adventurous writer and performer. Notes finds Anat leading a quartet of some of the most sought-after, engaging young performers in New York, including pianist Jason Lindner, bassist Omer Avital, and drummer Daniel Freedman, with accompaniment from guitarist Gilad Hekselman on three tracks. The album features compositions written by Cohen as well as her interpretations of songs by Fats Waller, John Coltrane, Sam Cooke and Ernesto Lecuona.

Early responses to the album have been overwhelmingly positive; The New York Times’ Nate Chinen wrote that Notes From The Village is a resounding confirmation; yes, she is the real deal”, DownBeat Magazine awarded the release four stars, stating that “Cohen makes it seem easy, mixing a gift for melody and an improvisational fluidity that has few peers today.”

Anat’s previous outings, Noir and Poetica were released simultaneously in April 2007, inspiring a string of enthusiastic reviews. The Washington Post said that “Cohen has emerged as one of the brightest, most original young instrumentalists in jazz [...] [she] has expanded the vocabulary of jazz with a distinctive accent of her own.” The Village Voice spoke of her “Enviable insouciance” and how “she alludes to the mystical in a merry way,” and Downbeat magazine expressed the opinion that “Noir could be a classic” and “[Cohen’s] stately intonation and unforced elegance on clarinet could take her to the top.”

Anat has performed for audiences in New York’s Village Vanguard, Jazz Standard, Iridium, The Jazz Gallery, and the JVC Jazz Festival. She has also appeared at the Chicago Jazz Festival, Washington DC’s Kennedy Center, San Francisco’s Yoshi's, Boston’s Regattabar, the North Sea Jazz Festival, the Monterey Jazz Festival, and the Montreal Jazz Festival. Anat’s July 2007 engagement at the Village Vanguard in New York was a historic one; Anat is the first female reed player, and the first Israeli to headline at the club.

Ms. Cohen’s accomplishments have been recognized in a flurry of awards and distinctions from critics and fans alike; She topped the Rising Star-Clarinet category in DownBeat Magazine’s critics poll in both 2007 and 2008, and placed prominently in a total of four categories including Rising Star Jazz Artist - where she ranked second and was the only female artist to make the list. Anat was also mentioned on DownBeat’s readers poll in 2007 and 2008. The Jazz Journalists Association named Anat Cohen Clarinetist of the Year by in both 2007 and 2008 – the first time in the history of the awards that an artist has earned top clarinet honors two years running. Noir and Poetica both appeared on many year-end best-of summary lists, including those of Paste magazine, The New York Sun, Slate, JazzTimes and others.

Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, Anat grew up with musical siblings; her older brother Yuval is himself a saxophonist of note, and her younger brother, Avishai, is one of New York’s busiest trumpeters. She began clarinet studies at age 12 and played jazz on clarinet for the first time in the Jaffa Conservatory’s Dixieland band. At 16, she joined the school’s big band and learned to play the tenor saxophone. The same year, Anat entered the prestigious “Thelma Yelin” High School for the Arts, where she majored in jazz. After graduation, she discharged her mandatory Israeli military service duty from 1993-95, playing tenor saxophone in the Israeli Air Force band.

In 1996, Anat matriculated at Berklee College of Music in Boston. There she met faculty member Phil Wilson, who encouraged her to play clarinet, and other inspiring teachers such as Greg Hopkins, Ed Tomassi, Hal Crook, George Garzone, and Bill Pierce, and an elite international peer group of students.

During her Berklee years, Anat visited New York during breaks between semesters, making a beeline for Smalls to soak up the hybrid of grooves, world music and mainstream jazz that people like Jason Lindner and Omer Avital were then evolving. Back in Boston, she played tenor saxophone in a variety of musical contexts with various bands including Afro-Cuban, Argentinean, klezmer, contemporary Brazilian music and classical Brazilian choro. Anat also began her association with Sherrie Maricle’s top-shelf all-woman big band Diva Jazz Orchestra, which continued into the new millennium.

Once ensconced in New York, Anat quickly found work in various Brazilian ensembles like the Choro Ensemble and Duduka Da Fonseca’s Samba Jazz Quintet, and started performing with David Ostwald’s “Gully Low Jazz Band,” which explores the music of Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet and their Pan-American contemporaries. Anat documented her bona fides on her debut CD, Place and Time, one of All About Jazz-New York’s “Best Debut Albums of 2005.”

On the liner notes for Notes From the Village, Ira Gitler writes “She is formidable. Long may she continue to enrich the music in myriad ways.” There is every indication that her star will continue to rise for a long time to come.

The Village Vanguard opened its doors in 1935 and is the archetypal Greenwich Village jazz club which has the right vibes and an excellent booking policy.

Monday through Thursday: $30.00 at the door (includes $20.00 admission plus a $10.00 drink minimum). Friday, Saturday and Sunday: $35.00 at the door (includes $25.00 admission plus a $10.00 drink minimum). Admission may increase slightly depending upon the artist. Drinks range in price from $5.00 to $10.00. Cash or traveler's checks with a valid passport (a copy is okay) or US driver's license only. Credit cards are accepted for online ticket or merchandise purchases only, but NOT at the club itself.

The club hasn't served food in 25 years. So if someone offers you a hamburger, check the expiration date.

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After 70 Years, The Village Vanguard Is Still in the Jazz Swing

By ASHLEY KAHN
February 8, 2005, Wall Street Journal; excerpt, full article on Village Vanguard website

To the uninitiated, the small club at the bottom of 15 well-trodden steps below street level may seem little more than a cramped, triangular-shaped room. But to a hip populace it’s where the ghosts of past jazz giants still play, where the best living jazz talent aspire to record, and where sound waves seem to reverberate in a manner unlike any other club, anywhere.

"I call it the Carnegie Hall of jazz because most jazz clubs just don't have the sound that that place has," says pianist Jason Moran, whose last album was recorded at the Vanguard. "It's the place where Moses and Mohammed and Jesus walked!"

Saxophonist Joe Lovano, whose most recent live album was also a Vanguard gig, agrees. "It might affect you to be sitting in that room, imagining, 'Oh, [Thelonious] Monk was here!' 'Man, Miles [Davis] and Hank Mobley played here, and Bill Evans's trio!' You're feeling the spirits. Well, that's how I feel when I record there -- we're calling the spirits."

Other jazz venues once claimed that kind of primacy. "The corner of the jazz world" was the boast of the original Birdland at Broadway and 55th. But the Vanguard, seven decades old -- still at 178 Seventh Avenue South, still with a seating capacity of 123 -- has survived them all.

The Vanguard's enduring stature as the jazz mecca -- calling the faithful to hear, to play and to record there -- owes much to a half-century's worth of classic albums recorded in the basement room, from Sonny Rollins's A Night at the Village Vanguard in 1957 and John Coltrane's and Bill Evans's famed Vanguard titles, both from '61, to Art Pepper's Thursday Night at... in '77, Tommy Flanagan's Nights at... in '86 and Wynton Marsalis's voluminous seven-disc Live at... in '99. A dozen more in the past two years alone have brought the number of titles generated at the club to close to 150. "The words 'Live at the Village Vanguard' do have a direct and positive influence on an album's sales," claims Bruce Lundvall, head of Blue Note Records, a leading jazz label with over a dozen Live at the Vanguard titles in its catalog.

A Live at the Vanguard album has become a rite of passage for modern jazz players, many of whom credit the room's unusual shape as the secret behind the club's complimentary acoustics. "The way the band can set up in that triangle-type corner, the sound really projects out," maintains Mr. Lovano. "It has a real opera house kind of a feeling -- there's nothing that goes behind you or on the sides." Kurt Lundvall, engineer on the recent Moran and Lovano sessions at the club, explains that "other clubs are like boxes, but in here, you have hardly any parallel or reflective surfaces, so the Vanguard is the best venue on the East Coast for recording jazz, period."