Jazz’s Skinny Stepchild

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Published: May 3, 2013

In search of some live Brazilian music a few months ago, I found my way to Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, in the Time Warner Center, where the Brazilian percussionist Duduka Da Fonseca was leading a quintet. I can’t say I knew much about Mr. Da Fonseca before I heard his band that night, and among the things I didn’t know was that his quintet’s regular reed player was a 38-year-old Israeli woman named Anat Cohen, who has lived in New York since 1999.

Artie Shaw in 1940, before clarinets fell out of favor.

On the first few tunes of the set — mostly the kind of fast-paced, Brazilian-tinged jazz I’ve always loved — Ms. Cohen played the reed instrument most closely associated with postwar jazz: the tenor saxophone. It was immediately apparent that she was a terrific musician, fluid, full-throated, with a knack for creating beautifully crafted, even eloquent solos. Around the fifth song, however, the quintet began playing “Chorinho pra Ele,” a simple, infectious samba by Hermeto Pascoal, the great Brazilian multi-instrumentalist. And that’s when Ms. Cohen did something you rarely see a jazz reed player do these days. She took out her clarinet.

As good as her saxophone playing was, Ms. Cohen on the clarinet was a revelation. Using the clarinet’s upper register, she could evoke infectious joy. In the lower register, her playing could conjure a deep, soulful melancholy. On up-tempo numbers, 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 only played a handful of songs on the clarinet that night, but every time she did, she took my breath away.

I suppose I could say that I’d never heard anyone play the clarinet quite like that, which would be true enough. (As I later learned, she’s been the Jazz Journalists Association’s clarinetist of the year for the last six years.) But let’s be honest here: like many jazz fans, I have rarely heard anyone play live jazz clarinet.

A dominant instrument in jazz’s early years, the clarinet faded into obscurity as the saxophone became the reed instrument of choice once Charlie Parker and his alto sax helped birth the bebop movement. When you think of jazz clarinetists, only a handful of names spring to mind, including Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, whose heyday was the 1930s, and Woody Allen, whose playing will never cause anyone to forget that he makes his living as a filmmaker.

Watching Ms. Cohen that night, I thought of another clarinet player: myself. All through grade school, I took lessons, but in high school, as I became captivated by jazz, I tossed the clarinet aside and took up the saxophone and flute. In the little high school group I played in, I don’t think I ever once trotted out my clarinet. In high school jam sessions, every reed player was a saxophonist. The clarinet was just, well, uncool. (“Highly mediocre” would be a generous way to describe my playing.)

I could imagine Ms. Cohen having those same feelings as a teenager. I could picture her abandoning her clarinet in favor of the hipper, harder-edge tenor sax. What I wound up wondering was what led Ms. Cohen back to the clarinet? And what did her re-embrace of it say not only about her, but about the clarinet’s potential to become a mainstream jazz instrument again?

“I wanted to be John Coltrane,” Ms. Cohen said with a laugh a few days later, when we met in her small East Village office. The second of three children, Ms. Cohen grew up surrounded by music; her brothers were also aspiring jazz musicians. (Indeed, all three Cohens are musicians today: older brother, Yuval, plays the soprano saxophone, while younger brother, Avishai, is a trumpeter. They often play together as the 3 Cohens.) By the time they were in their early teens, the Cohens were all enrolled in a music conservatory in Tel Aviv.

Ms. Cohen took up the clarinet because the conservatory needed clarinet players, and she was amenable. The instrument fit well with her first introduction to jazz: the conservatory’s Dixieland band, which she joined. “I discovered that I loved the music of New Orleans,” she said. The clarinet, of course, was an important instrument in early New Orleans jazz.

But as her tastes broadened, Ms. Cohen fell under the sway of Coltrane, the great 1960s tenor saxophonist. In high school, a teacher told her that her clarinet really didn’t fit with the modern jazz she liked. “I kind of put a cap on my clarinet without really thinking about it,” she recalled.

By the time she enrolled in Berklee College of Music in Boston in 1996, she was a committed tenor saxophonist, wanting nothing so much as to emulate the “sheets of sound” that Coltrane made so famous.

At Berklee, she occasionally picked up the clarinet — “whenever they needed a clarinet player, they called me” — and remembers one of her professors telling her that she “really had a sound on the clarinet.” But she let the remark pass. By 1999, she had moved to New York, and was making her way as a professional musician. She was the tenor saxophonist in an all-female jazz ensemble called the Diva Jazz Orchestra. Her friend, the Brazilian saxophonist Daniela Spielmann, recalled that when she first met Ms. Cohen, “all she ever played was the saxophone.”