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ANAT COHEN & Marcello Gonçalves
Jazz Coterie live music concert series welcomes Anat Cohen and Marcello Gonçalves to our pop-up jazz clubs in Wisconsin.
3X Grammy Nominee & Perennial Critics Pick for “Clarinetist of the Year”
Clarinetist Anat Cohen and 7-string guitarist Marcello Gonçalves team together in a series of intimate, lyrical duets based on compositions by Brazilian composer Moacir Santos. Brazilian grooves, and elements of jazz highlight the intricate talents of both Cohen and Gonçalves on their Grammy Award nominated album, Outra Coisa: The Music of Moacir Santos.
“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.”
DownBeat Magazine writes, “Outra Coisa is a duo album that achieves something very rare: It reduces the big band arrangements of the great Brazilian jazz composer Santos down to just two musicians…The mastery of the two musicians is such as to render additional instruments superfluous.” On stage, the duo’s joyful interplay is utterly captivating.
“What’s not to love about a clarinetist who plays everything we love — modern jazz, world music, “hot” New Orleans style jazz — and does it all brilliantly?”
Ever charismatic, prolific and inspired, Grammy-nominated clarinetist-saxophonist Anat Cohen has won hearts and minds the world over with her expressive virtuosity and delightful stage presence. The New York Times writes, “Ms. Cohen on the clarinet was a revelation. She could evoke infectious joy and conjure deep, soulful melancholy. Her improvisations weren’t just bebop fast; they had a clarity and deep intelligence that is really quite rare. She made it look effortless, even as she was playing the most technically difficult of all the reed instruments…she took my breath away.”
Anat has been declared Clarinetist of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association every year since 2007 and has also been named the top clarinetist in both the readers and critics polls in DownBeat as well as Jazz Artist of the Year. In 2009, ASCAP awarded Anat a Wall of Fame prize for composition and musicianship.
“A present day multicultural wonder. An enthralling clarinetist and a persuasive saxophonist, Anat displays a pan-historical, pan-cultural approach to jazz.”
Anat was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, and raised into a musical family. She attended the Tel Aviv School for the Arts, the "Thelma Yellin" High School for the Arts and the Jaffa Music Conservatory. Anat 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; it was this same year that Anat entered the prestigious Thelma Yellin school, where she majored in jazz. After graduation, she served her mandatory Israeli military duty from 1993-95, playing tenor saxophone in the Israeli Air Force band. Through the World Scholarship Tour, Anat was able to attend the Berklee College of Music, where she expanded her musical horizons, developing a deep love and facility for various Latin music styles. During her Berklee years, Anat visited New York City during semester breaks, making a beeline for the West Village club Smalls to soak up a melting pot of jazz, contemporary grooves and world music in a scene that included such future collaborators as Jason Lindner, Omer Avital and Daniel Freedman.
Moving to New York in 1999 after graduating from Berklee, Anat soon began to bend ears and turn heads; whether playing clarinet, soprano saxophone or tenor saxophone, she won over the most knowing of jazz sages: Nat Hentoff praised her “bursting sound and infectious beat,” Dan Morgenstern her “gutsy, swinging” style, Ira Gitler her “liquid dexterity and authentic feeling,” and Gary Giddins her musicality “that bristles with invention.”
In 2009, Anat became the first Israeli to headline at the Village Vanguard, the setting for perhaps the most celebrated live recordings in jazz history; the occasion yielded the 2010 release Clarinetwork: Live at the Village Vanguard, which captured the leader paying tribute to Benny Goodman and leading a hard-swinging combo with all-stars Benny Green, Peter Washington and Lewis Nash. Calling Anat “one to watch,” NPR underscored the contemporary approach the group took to the Goodman book: “Cohen and company treat 1920s and ’30s material with a relatively free hand; when they get rolling in ‘Sweet Georgia Brown,’ her rhythm section echoes the thunder of John Coltrane’s quartet.”
Anat has been introduced onstage at Dizzy’s Club in the Jazz at Lincoln Center complex as “one of the greatest players ever of the clarinet.” Having first appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival in 2007, she had the honor of being the music director for the Newport Jazz Festival all-star band that toured the U.S. on the occasion of the festival’s 60th anniversary in 2014. In 2017, Anat played all the major European festivals as part of the all-star, all-female band called ARTEMIS alongside the likes of Renée Rosnes and Cécile McLorin Salvant. She has also toured in a duo with acclaimed pianist Fred Hersch, as well as with iconic Cuban singer Omara Portuondo.
However easy Anat makes it seem onstage, the mastery of any great art is a long, elusive challenge, and she teaches the fine points of jazz and the music of Brazil to budding students across North America, including recent residencies at Stanford, Oberlin, Michigan State University, University of California-San Diego, the Centrum Choro Workshop and California Brazil Camp. About her experiences onstage, in the classroom or just engaging with her listeners, Anat says: “Any day when I get to share music with people – other musicians, an audience – feels like a celebration to me.”