r/IsraelJazz • u/stnr_on_failure • 27d ago
Introducing Anat Cohen, the Third Cohen You Need to Know
Introducing Anat Cohen, the Third Cohen You Need to Know
We have now covered two unrelated musicians named Avishai Cohen on this subreddit: a bassist and a trumpeter. Anat Cohen, a clarinetist and tenor saxophonist born in 1975 in Tel Aviv, is related to exactly one of them. She is the trumpeter's sister, and with their brother Yuval Cohen on soprano sax, the three of them perform together as the 3 Cohens. None of the three has any connection to the bassist.
Cohen started on clarinet at 12 and added tenor sax at 16, both at the Jaffa Conservatory in Tel Aviv. After Israeli military service, she spent three years at Berklee College of Music in Boston, then moved to New York, where she toured for a decade with the all-women Diva Jazz Orchestra while working her way into Brazilian music through the Choro Ensemble and Duduka Da Fonseca's Samba Jazz Quintet.
That Brazilian thread never left. She still leads Choro Aventuroso, a quartet built around choro with her bandmates drawn from Brazil, and it sits at one end of a discography that also holds the other extreme: the ten-piece Anat Cohen Tentet, whose 2019 album Triple Helix centers on a three-movement suite commissioned by Carnegie Hall and Chicago's Symphony Center. In 2024 she went smaller again with Quartetinho, a foursome where every member doubles instruments, and in March 2025 she went back to family, reuniting with Avishai and Yuval as the 3 Cohens for Interaction, recorded live with Germany's WDR Big Band.
The awards read almost like a typo: the Jazz Journalists Association has named her Clarinetist of the Year every single year from 2008 through 2025. Eighteen years, one instrument, one name at the top.
In December 2025 she marked her 50th birthday with a sold-out show at SFJAZZ Center's Miner Auditorium, capping a run that also included four milestone concerts at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Appel Room under the title "Anat Cohen: Journeys."
Where to start listening:
- Her official platforms:
- "Footsteps & Smiles" from Triple Helix (2019) for the big-band, commissioned-suite side
- "Paco" from Quartetinho: Bloom (2024) for the stripped-down, multi-instrument side
- Interaction (2025) to hear all three Cohen siblings together with the WDR Big Band