Anat Cohen interview: "Encountering the Brazilian choro tradition is what got me back into playing the clarinet"

It’s been a busy year so far for clarinetist and saxophonist Anat Cohen, not least with four concerts at the Lincoln Center’s Appel Room back in March, celebrating her 50th birthday. But in addition to that, she’s been busy on the recording front, having launched the album Bloom last year, with her small group, the Quartetinho, and this spring releasing Interaction, along with her two brothers Avishai and Yuval (‘the 3 Cohens’), playing with the WDR Big Band.

One thing that struck me immediately on hearing the latter record was that there’s one track with just the three of them – Anat on clarinet, Avishai on trumpet and Yuval on tenor saxophone – playing the Gerry Mulligan composition ‘Festive Minor’. It took me right back in time to 2005 when she released her debut album Place and Time, because on that disc she and Avishai recreated the Mulligan quartet line-up for a version of ‘As Catch Can’.

I wanted to know: had his [Mulligan’s] music made a big impression on her when she was starting off?

“As my brothers and I were growing up, we had a Mulligan cassette, and we listened to it endlessly. The sound of the two horns of Art Farmer and Gerry was a musical conversation. What we understood from hearing them was that the melody shines out, but the countermelody is as important. Also as each piece goes on, they switch roles, and the arrangements are impeccable. Listening back, it seems so simple, so musical and so melodic.

“It took me a long time, back then, to realise there was no piano, because they are always playing in harmony, and when you hear that, you don’t need a piano player to tell you ‘This is the chord!’ We listened to that music over and over again.

“Funnily enough, I still have a recording that dates from the time that Avishai and I were students at Berklee in 1997, made in the performance space there, and we’re playing ‘My Funny Valentine’, and of course we’re playing the Mulligan version. I play the Mulligan harmonies, because that’s the only thing I can hear in my head when the other horn takes the melody.”

I suggest that it was a slightly new twist on the piece, because there and on ‘As Catch Can’, she was playing tenor saxophone, not baritone. Though nowadays she focuses mainly on clarinet, as she does on Interaction.

“At Berklee I was just a tenor player, but when it came to that piece, as I say, that’s the version both of us hear. We know the exact phrases. And so on our new album, here we are, with three horns, yet that is still the model for us. Though I’ve never had a full conversation about it with Avishai and Yuval, it’s just internal to all of us how important that music has been, and how to function as both a lead horn player and as an accompanist within a band. Because, in the standard quartet, the horn player takes the melody, then does a solo, and their role is kind of done.

“This is different. Of course we all have experience of playing in big bands, but when it came to this album we all just agreed that if we did one track with just the three of us (which is how we played when we were growing up together) we have to be both the horns and the rhythm section. I think we learned about subtleties and about changing roles, and when I teach, I talk about being a soloist, but also about this other side to the music.

“When we were coming up, we all played in bands and in a youth orchestra. If you’re playing third clarinet in a band you’re almost always playing accompanying lines, as only the first clarinet gets the melody! So you draw on that experience later, when you are playing in an ensemble. So I can definitely say the Mulligan music was a huge influence and a guideline to life.”

I suggest that some elements of that experience can turn up in the most unexpected places in Anat’s recordings. A good example might be her minimalist version of the Flying Lotus piece ‘Putty Boy Strut’ from her 2015 album Luminosa, where she starts playing clarinet over the percussion of Gilmar Gomes, before gradually bassist Joe Martin and pianist Jason Lindner join the action.

“That was an experiment in taking electronic music – which was what the original track by Flying Lotus is – and making it acoustic. I was fascinated by the computer-generated sounds, but the challenge is to catch the build-up of the track in an entirely acoustic setting.”

Thinking of acoustic settings, I am fascinated by her long-term musical partnership with the 7-string guitarist Marcello Gonçalves, in which they create the most intimate chamber jazz, but often from material that is anything but that – notably on their 2017 album Outro Coisa, which scales down 12 large-ensemble scores by Brazilian composer Moacir Santos to light, elegant duo pieces, where her clarinet, notably on the lower register, sits beautifully with Gonçalves’ guitar sound.

“I’ve known Marcello for over 20 years, and he comes from the Brazilian choro tradition which is what got me back to playing the clarinet. I had been focusing mainly on the tenor saxophone, but I made a trip to Brazil over two decades ago, to explore the country’s music. I took the clarinet because it was easier to travel with, and I fell in love with choro. For me that tradition of instrumental music from the 19th century, with syncopation and improvisation, has a lot in common with jazz, but I particularly loved the sound of the 7-string guitar in that setting. And, oddly, choro has a lot in common with the polyphonic aspects of Gerry Mulligan’s work.

“Because in choro music, just as in the music of New Orleans, the melodic lines weave together. (I should mention that New Orleans jazz was the earliest influence on me and my brothers, and that’s what we played when we started out. One of our first albums was called Braid, to symbolize the interweaving of our melodic lines).

“In choro, the 7-string guitar is always there to play counter-melody, a role which it also has with samba, where it’s completing the harmonies. It leads from one section to the next of a song, outlining the harmony and also completing the melody, so it’s a constant musical conversation. So, Marcello had this idea of taking a deep dive into the music of Moacir Santos, whose music I didn’t really know, apart from Baden Powell’s albums of his work.

“One day Marcello wrote me an email, saying, ‘I have a dream – I want to play the music of Moacir Santos with my guitar and your clarinet.’ So he started taking these full big band arrangements and reducing them to be played on the 7-string. In due course, we met in the studio, with him playing his version of these arrangements and me sight-reading the music, and that became the album. There’s something very minimalist about it and a lot of space. We sat without headphones, and that made me use the low register of the clarinet so I could hear every detail of his playing, and we had these super grooves, with so much space that every note counts. But Santos’ melodies are eternal, everything also felt so familiar!”

I wondered how it had felt with the same partnership interpreting the very different music of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer’ on their follow up album Reconvexo?

“It was during the pandemic and we heard this song, which seemed so moving. I guess there are songs you hear all your life and then one day they just strike you differently. And then on the other hand we have the danceable ‘Il Diablo Svelto’, which he arranged in such a way for guitar that you feel like you’re playing with a full orchestra. And right now we’re working on a third album.”

At completely the other end of the spectrum, the largest group Anat leads is her Tentet, whose work includes the impressive Triple Helix album from 2019, which includes the three-part title track – which is a kind of clarinet concerto in miniature – and several more pieces by the composer and pianist Oded Lev-Ari.

“Oded has been an inseparable part of my life and indeed my family life, because we’ve been friends since high school. And we have our record label Anzic, which we, but mainly Oded, set up together, and which issued all the albums we have discussed. I travel so much that he does much of the business of running the label, but we also make music together and he is an incredible person. And we had the idea of doing a larger band together. Our first big band was on the Anzic album Noir back in 2007.

“Then we decided to create the Tentet, which was the ‘smallest large ensemble’ we could think of! We wanted such a versatile group that we could play anything from classical music to funk, to Brazilian music. We have multi-instrumentalists and players who can easily wear different hats. Then Oded got the commission from Carnegie Hall and the Chicago Symphony to write ‘Triple Helix’, which we premiered for both places the same weekend. Then we went into the studio and recorded it, picking up a Grammy nomination along the way! I remember how in the middle movement ‘For Anat’, the music just starts growing and growing, and when we first played it through I started to cry in the rehearsal, because I felt all our lives and everything we had done together had been leading to this very moment. We had a big tour planned for it in 2020, but sadly none of it happened because of the pandemic.”

Anat went on to say that this naturally meant that the Tentet lost some of its focus and so in the last two or three years her focus has shifted slightly and she has been playing and recording with three musicians from the Tentet in her Quartethino, the Portuguese for ‘small quartet’. She’s bringing this band to Ronnie Scott’s in London on 16 June, giving us the chance to hear what I described here in Jazzwise (November 2024) as its “magical sense of space and beautiful changes of texture”, helped by guitarist Tal Masiach doubling on bass, Vitor Gonçalves on both piano and accordion, and James Shipp on vibes and percussion.

“It’s some years since I last played in London, so it’ll be great to come here. I love Quartethino, and the way the sound has developed since our first album in 2022 to Bloom last year. We’ve been touring and it’s been a great, but hectic, couple of years. Maybe after this I’ll take a little time to be in one place and compose, so it’s a good moment to hear us!”

Anat Cohen’s Quartetinho play Ronnie Scott’s, London on 16 June