“The Power of Music is Bigger than Us”
Northampton Jazz Festival Exclusive Interview with Anat Cohen
by Ricard Torres-Mateluna, Northampton Jazz Festival Board Member and Papeles de Jazz Magazine (Chile) Editorial Board Member and North American correspondent.
Anat Cohen has been captivating audiences worldwide with her virtuosity, warmth, generosity and unique blend of jazz traditions. She is a true maestro of the jazz clarinet. With her unique blend of classical technique, improvisational brilliance, and a deep understanding of jazz tradition, Cohen has become a leading figure in the contemporary jazz scene. Her ability to seamlessly navigate diverse musical styles, from traditional New Orleans jazz, Brazilian Choro to avant-garde explorations, has earned her a reputation as a versatile and groundbreaking artist. In this exclusive interview, we delve into her musical journey, her inspirations, collaborations and her new upcoming projects.
Who is Anat Cohen?
I am a musician. When I say that, it’s because when I play music, inside everything makes sense, and I feel free and safe and it’s my preferred space to be, which in a way makes me a musician, but a lot of people might feel the same – whether they play music or just listen to music. When I play the clarinet, I find a way to be who I am which is a pretty serious person, but also a very goofy person. I like to joke around and to create little moments – interpersonal moments – looking at the person in front of me, looking at their expressions, and react and interact. I look for the same thing in music.
Your album, “Luminosa,” included Brazilian Choro music. What aspect of Choro do you find captivating, and what and how does it complement your jazz background?
Choro music is extremely demanding, and this music is played in very informal places: Think of people sitting around the table in a circle and playing music with each other, laughing and drinking beer, and at the same time the music could be so extremely demanding, virtuosic, complex with multiple layers and multi-phonic lines going at the same time. It reflects that you have to be very quick, like a soccer player, where the melody is the ball that moves around really, really fast between the players – you’ve got to be constantly alert. You got to learn to receive and give very quickly.
Choro music has everything: It has seriousness, because you have to be an instrumentalist, and you must have abilities on the instrument in order to play this music, because its sound is really demanding. You also have to be very expressive and very much in touch with your feelings to be able to have all the nuances of sound to express and make the melody your own.
In a way, that’s what jazz musicians are after, to find their own voice and sounds to be able to express it. In that sense Choro and jazz are the same: It’s about the search; take a melody and make it your own; the degree of improvisation varies and depends on who you are playing with. I think you can say the same of jazz: how much can you push the envelope? In Choro you can just embellish the melody and it’s already considered some sort of improvisation and you go as far as you can, depending on your fellow musicians. Of course, in some situations, some might say, “This person went too far, it’s no longer Choro.” Having the sensibility of how far to go and how to push your bandmates and how to interact and how to converse – it’s basically the art of conversation.
The clarinet is not as common in “modern jazz” as some other instruments. What drew you to the clarinet, and what do you think it brings to contemporary jazz?
Luckily nobody told me it wasn’t a common jazz instrument. When I picked up the clarinet, I didn’t know jazz just yet. I was just learning an instrument for learning an instrument, for learning music. I did not know that the clarinet, years later, was going to open doors for me and take me around the world and introduce me to so many cultures and wonderful people and wonderful places.
I started to play clarinet, and the first jazz encounter I had was with the music of New Orleans. You asked me about Choro, but the music of New Orleans has such magical sound - there is so much joy in it, with the bounciness of swing and how it’s complex yet simple – so if you can figure out how to play a melody, and how to improvise in one short chorus, and are able to find your humorous side, it definitely exposes the personality of the player. The solos are short, constantly interacting with other people – so you have to be there to support everyone. It’s about group playing, making a sound together; and there are layers – the trumpet, the clarinet above, the trombone underneath so it’s a really beautiful experience in training your ears and your musicality.
With the clarinet, when I started playing music I wasn’t thinking, “Oh this is jazz, this is early jazz, should I play the clarinet, or be more modern?” I just fell in love with the sound. But of course when I was in high school in Israel, I learned that the clarinet was not popular, and the teacher asked me to play saxophone and not to play the clarinet, so I put it on hold for at least 10 years. I was focusing on saxophone and learning jazz. Then I went to Berklee College of Music as a saxophone player – to pursue my jazz studies as a saxophone player – and Brazilian Choro brought me back to the clarinet.
The clarinet is an instrument that you have mastered. How do you intertwine the musical traditions of the Middle East and Brazil (which is itself is a mix of African, European and indigenous cultures) through this one instrument?
There is no one point when you say, “I’m going to take this kind of music and blend it with another kind of music.” I think everything happens pretty organically. I meet musicians – I met some Brazilian people when I was in Boston, I met musicians from Venezuela and Colombia – and these people are passionate about their own music. So you say, “Wait: I want to know about it!” It’s the same thing when you meet people who play jazz. You like the sound of Art Blakey, or the sound of Trane or late-Trane or Louis Armstrong. If you’re passionate about something, you are going to show it to another person with enthusiasm, and they’ll want to know about it. Every kind of music that I learned, that I got to play, somebody played for me, and got me intrigued, and I wanted to do more of that. Once you start playing the music, you get involved with other people who play this, and it becomes part of you. I entered a bunch of bands with people that play music from Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil; once you do it for a while it becomes part of the spices that you add to your soup.
As a multi award-winning clarinetist, how do you continue to challenge yourself and evolve as a musician?
I am very grateful for the recognition, for the awards. Those awards are not part of the process of growing and developing as a musician. The path, the instrument itself, the clarinet is very demanding. I always joke with my colleagues because, the more I practice the harder it gets. So you know, the idea is to just keep getting better and keep finding new collaborations. The awards are a separate part of this process of growing as a musician; it’s completely independent. The task – daily, weekly, monthly, yearly – that we put on ourselves, is the pressure to carry the torch, to keep getting better. It’s just an inner-calling, and of course with these recognitions, getting awards as a clarinetist just puts more pressure on. Oh, I need to keep developing, keep growing, you know I can’t slack, so in some way it puts a nice little fire underneath me.
You have collaborated with many musicians. Can you share a particularly memorable experience or lesson learned from one of these collaborations?
I played with George Wein, who was the founder of the Newport Jazz Festival, where he was playing piano, we did a week with George. This was the first time I played with the Newport All-Stars including Jimmy Cobb on drums, Esperanza Spalding on bass, Randy Brecker on trumpet and Howard Alden on guitar and myself. It was such an incredible experience. George liked to play tunes, he has many generations of jazz and the history of jazz, and Jimmy and Randy and young people like Esperanza and me at the time. You just played tunes and you found a way to communicate and just make music and you realize that the power of music is bigger than us. You know, you “call a tune” and make it work because you want to make it work. It’s really an incredible gift that jazz gives us to communicate intergenerationally.
Tell us about a current project or any upcoming releases that you’re excited about.
I am very excited about a new album with my quartet, Anat Cohen Quartetinho coming out this September 27. This is our second album called Quartetinho Bloom. It’s a beautiful evolution of the band since we started to play the four of us including James Shipp who plays percussion and vibraphone from Columbia, Maryland. We have Vitor Gonçalves playing accordion and piano from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Tal Mashiach playing bass and guitar from Harashim, Israel. These are people that I met in different parts of my journey and at some point I put a tentet together, a 10 piece band, among them James, Vitor and Tal, but at some point we decided to play in a quartet, a more “portable band.” But since every person here plays two instruments – between percussion and vibraphone, accordion, piano, bass, guitar clarinet and bass clarinet - it didn’t quite became a smaller band; it is actually a very big quartet. But I love these guys! We’ve been exploring a lot of different sounds together and learning to build trust, to explore free sounds, free improvisation into very concrete and steady beats. These are very creative individuals, super wonderful people, supportive listeners, virtuoso instrumentalists who bring the music to what the music wants. I’m very excited about this album coming out on my own record label, Anzic Records with my partner Oded Lev-Ari. He is an incredible man, producer, musician, arranger, writer, composer, so we’re putting out this album, which is very, very exciting.
What advice would you give aspiring clarinetists looking to make their mark in Jazz?
My first advice would be, don’t let people tell you that you can’t play jazz on the clarinet, because this happens way too often. I meet students in high school and maybe they play the clarinet and I said what do you play in the band? Oh, in the band I play the saxophone, and I say why? And they say because the director says there’s no parts for clarinet – so that’s where the attitude starts. Don’t let people tell you can’t play jazz on the clarinet. I tell them, have your teacher call me! I had to go through the same route – If you play jazz, you’ve got to pick up the saxophone. The important thing is to remember that the clarinet is an incredible instrument with a huge range, but it also has a huge, wide palette of sounds and it can’t fit in in many situations and you just need to figure out how to connect with the sound of the instrument and make it work because it CAN work. I don’t know why some people feel that the saxophone can fit more situations than the clarinet – I disagree! The clarinet can play anything!
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For tickets to Anat Cohen Quartetinho on Saturday, September 28 at 7:30 PM at the Academy of Music Theater, click here.
