Anat Cohen Tentet

Clarinetist-saxophonist Anat Cohen has won hearts and minds around the globe with her expressive virtuosity and magnetic stage presence, earning esteem both as a musician’s musician and as a performer who charms new recruits to the jazz art like few others. With her acclaimed albums, sold-out world tours and Grammy Award nominations adding up over the past two and a half decades — not to mention the glowing profiles by such totemic outlets as NPR’s Fresh Air and The New York Times — it has become apparent that the Brooklyn-based Anat has evolved into one of the music’s great border-bounding leaders, as not only an artist but as an educator, an ambassador. At the core of this, there is always her jubilant, ever-exploratory music-making, as a soloist, bandleader, collaborator and composer. Revered journalist and jazz sage Nat Hentoff encapsulated her artistry this way: “Anat does what all authentic musicians do: She tells stories from her own experiences that are so deeply felt that they are very likely to connect listeners to their own dreams, desires and longings.”

Anat’s prolific series of releases via her Anzic Records label have seen her range from infectious swingers to lilting balladry, from small groups to larger ensembles and back again, exploring a world of music along the way. Bloom, Anat’s 21st album as a leader or co-leader and the second with her small group Quartetinho, was issued to rave reviews and a hit trans-Atlantic tour in 2024, with All About Jazz applauding the band’s “daring virtuosity and soulful joie de vivre.” Hot on the heels of that release comes a live album, out in March 2025: Interaction, which presents the clarinetist as part of The 3 Cohens — the long-running family band that also stars her brothers, trumpeter Avishai and saxophonist Yuval (both ECM artists) — recorded in concert with Germany’s WDR Big Band.

Along with a Grammy nomination for Triple Helix, the second album by her Tentet, Anat has received Grammy nods for two albums devoted to the sounds of Brazil: Outra Coisa: The Music of Moacir Santos (with guitarist Marcello Gonçalves) and Rosa Dos Ventos (with Trio Brasileiro). DownBeat declared that Anat “is now to the clarinet what Stan Getz was to the tenor saxophone in the 1960s: a jazz musician who speaks the language so fluently that she has become a beacon of Brazilian music to the larger jazz world.” She has toured from across North and South America to Europe, Asia and India, headlining at the Newport, Umbria and North Sea jazz festivals as well as at Chicago’s Symphony Center, SFJAZZ’s Miner Auditorium and such hallowed clubs as New York’s Village Vanguard.