4 To Watch: Anat Cohen

Hometown: Tel Aviv, Israel
Fun fact: Cohen served her mandatory two years in the Israeli military playing saxophone in the Air Force’s big band.
Why she's worth watching: She’s a triple threat—player, composer and bandleader—with a keen ear for global rhythms.
For fans of: John Coltrane, Astor Piazzolla, Milton Nascimento

Though she’s regarded as one of the most promising young horn players in New York, Anat Cohen was strictly a classically inclined clarinetist until she was 16. There was already one saxophonist in the family (her older brother Yuval) and a trumpeter (her baby brother Avishai). But one day, fate came honking.

“I was in the conservatory in Tel Aviv,” Cohen says, as she reclines on a rainy morning in her townhouse near Washington Square. “They had a big band, and the conductor came to me and said ‘we need a tenor saxophonist.’” Cohen went to the storage room, picked through a box of mouthpieces, and reached up to a shelf for her new axe. "It was a struggle," she says with a laugh. "The tenor was really big. But if felt good to be one of the guys. With the clarinet, I always felt like an outsider. I wanted to be doing what everyone else was doing.”

Since moving to New York in 1999, the Berklee College of Music graduate has become one of the city’s vital musical insiders, part of an informal circle of friends whose sound and style took shape during long nights at the original incarnation of the West Village club Small’s. Cohen still gigs at the corner bars of downtown Manhattan, especially when she’s jamming with Brazilian, Afro-Cuban and Argentinean players, whose rhythms infuse her compositions. But she’s also becoming a name on the city’s blue-chip circuit, a status made evident by a weeklong run this summer at the Village Vanguard, a legendary venue not exactly known for its liberal booking policies.

"I love so many different things," says Cohen, whose most recent albums, Poetica and Noir, explore different sides of a romantic personality with ensembles both small and large. “I had to take a breath and realize that music is music, and there’s got to be a way to make it one thing."