[JPL] A Musical World Traveler Who Likes to Mix Things Up

[r durfee]

May 11, 2007
Music Review | Anat Cohen Quartet
A Musical World Traveler Who Likes to Mix Things Up 
By BEN RATLIFF
Anat Cohen’s quartet was playing jazz at the Jazz
Standard on Wednesday night, and it was jazz that
imported elements from the Middle East and South
America and the language of early-20th-century
classical music. That’s impressive, but not so
surprising; those elements have all become moving
parts in a jazz composer’s vocabulary. More curiously,
it was jazz that behaved like pop — determined,
encased in strong melodies and played at medium-full
projection — and the musicians were articulating every
note. 

But one of the possible refinements for a young jazz
group is to take things away, put some spaces in the
notes and phrases and test the elasticity of the band.
Playing music from Ms. Cohen’s new album “Poetica”
(Anzic), her band created a sound that felt carved in
stone, a little inflexible, with an almost full-body
impact.

Ms. Cohen, an Israeli musician who came to New York in
1999, has been a valuable part of the local jazz scene
ever since: playing lead tenor saxophone with the
all-female Diva Jazz Orchestra, playing Louis
Armstrong’s music with David Ostwald’s Gully Low Jazz
Band, playing Brazilian choro and samba with local
bands and getting into the thick of the new mainstream
jazz, sometimes with her brothers Avishai, the
trumpeter, and Yuval, the pianist. 

In many ways she’s an ideal: well prepared,
passionately literate in music far outside her local
circle, an improviser with gusto. She understands how
dance rhythms leaven and quicken jazz; her piece “La
Casa del Llano,” moving between five-beat and two-beat
bounces, was tight with energy. And she has a full,
even, unsqueaking tone, especially on the clarinet, an
instrument that could use another distinctive voice in
jazz.

Ms. Cohen played only clarinet on Wednesday. (The
night before, at the same club, she had played
saxophone with a whole other show of ambition: a
14-piece orchestra, performing music from her other
new record, “Noir.”) Between Jason Lindner’s steady
vamps and inside-the-piano thumping, Omer Avital’s
big, woody bass notes and Daniel Freedman’s drum
grooves, the rhythm section felt heavy, almost
battering. This was offset by the appearance of a
string quartet, playing arrangements written by Mr.
Avital, and in the presence of the strings the jazz
quartet reduced itself. For a version of John
Coltrane’s “Lonnie’s Lament,” the string players
usefully deepened the harmony implied in the original
piece; for the Israeli song “Ein Gedi” — rendered as
pastoral classical music — they were the music itself,
with the rhythm section dropping out completely.

During her solo in “Lonnie’s Lament” Ms. Cohen
intimated her strength as a soloist, shifting into
double time over the ballad tempo, lengthening
improvised phrases at will and leaving a few holes.
Here, in her ability to alter what was already there
and shift the music’s focus to revision and
reinvention, lay the promise of the band.

The Anat Cohen Quartet will perform tonight at the
Kennedy Center in Washington.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/11/arts/music/11anat.html?_r=1&ref=music&oref=login

Roy Durfee
P.O. Box 40219
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87196-0219
rdurfee2003 at yahoo.com


 
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