# CD review: Anat Cohen – Quartetinho 2022: Video, CD cover

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2022/11/09/cd-review-anat-cohen-quartetinho-2022-video-cd-cover/
- Published: 2022-11-09T00:04:37+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**GRAMMY-nominated multireedist and composer Anat Cohen shifts her focus to an intimate
group sound on her newest release, the endlessly colorful Quartetinho (pronounced“
quar-te-CHIN-yo,” i.e., little quartet).**

The group of New York-based international multi instrumentalist-virtuosos are all
drawn from the ranks of her GRAMMY-nominated Tentet featuring bassist Tal Mashiach,
pianist/accordionist Vitor Gonçalves, and vibraphonist/percussionist James Shipp.
They share a deep love for music in all its heterogeneity and it’s all amply documented
on Quartetinho, which includes originals by Cohen, Mashiach and Shipp along with
material by the great masters Antonio Carlos Jobim, Egberto Gismonti and more. The
result is boundlessly melodic and lyrical, with a wide array of timbres and subtle
details of orchestration.

On the bandstand, Anat Cohen is a whirlwind of restless emotion. Her clarinet raised
toward the heavens or lowered toward that other place below, she delivers streams
of sound that seem to flow through her horn directly from her heart.

Chalk it up, if you wish, to acculturation. Cohen, 42, is a child of Israel, and
her sense of musicality reflects the unabashed expressivity of that nation’s people.
But, as she unwound on a late-August afternoon in her quiet Brooklyn apartment, 
a more specific source of her feelings became clear.

Eying a dour portrait of Franz Liszt peering down from the wall — then glancing 
at the music books by Frédéric Chopin, Yusef Lateef, and Nicolas Slonimsky arrayed
on the stand of her Steinway grand — she suddenly picked up the clarinet that sat
atop the piano and let loose a dazzling run. The moment packed the punch of a Carnegie
Hall performance.

“When I play the clarinet,” she says, a smile enveloping her face, “I can be myself.”

### **Being in the moment**

For Cohen, the realization that the clarinet could be a tool of self-discovery was
a gradual one. Arriving in New York from Tel Aviv via Boston’s Berklee College of
Music in 1999, she viewed herself more as a saxophonist who also played the clarinet.
It wasn’t until 2007 that she released an all-clarinet album, _Poetica_, and several
years later that her identity as a clarinetist was secure.

That identity will be doubly affirmed when, on Thursday, Oct. 20, she returns to
the Lensic Performing Arts Center. In what promises to be a sonorous occasion, she
will be making liberal use of both the standard Bb clarinet and its larger sibling,
the bass clarinet — an instrument whose lower register will allow her to plumb greater
depths, both musical and emotional.

The vehicle for this adventure will be her latest quartet, Quartetinho, and, truth
be told, the bass clarinet is just one of the instruments the group is deploying
that will lend it a distinctive flavor. When mixed and matched with her clarinets,
the others — vibraphone, synthesizer, accordion, acoustic and electric pianos, double
bass, and seven-string guitar — will, in the absence of a drum set, distinguish 
the sound from that of most jazz quartets.

“It’s an experiment,” says Cohen, a perennial winner of critics’ and readers’ jazz
polls.

The appearance of a vibraphone and synthesizer, alone or in combination, will be
a first in Cohen’s quartets. Both will be handled by James Shipp, who will also 
play percussion. Shipp, whose association with Cohen reaches back more than a decade
to jams at a Uruguayan bar in Brooklyn, was recruited for Quartetinho based in part
on his inventive contributions to Cohen’s tentet. That group’s _Triple Helix_, released
in 2019, earned a Grammy nomination for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album.

“He’s a writer and creator, and he always explores something a bit different, a 
little bit odd,” Cohen says of Shipp. “He’s not the typical mainstream guy.”

A characteristically idiosyncratic creation of Shipp’s “Baroquen Spirit,” will, 
she says, likely open the Oct. 20 performance. The piece, written in response to
a dispiriting experience Shipp had with an opera company, centers on randomly triggered
drone sounds at play under a lyrical melody and juxtaposed against what he called“
ugly, weird notes.” To create those notes, the musicians employ extended techniques.
Shipp, for example, drags his mallet against the side of the vibraphone’s resonator,
conjuring a strangely appealing whine.

Shipp says that, in the quartet’s performances so far — a monthlong tour in March
and a handful of other shows — the musicians have gleefully dug into their bags 
of technical tricks, “mischievously racing each other to get to those weird notes.”
The effect can border on the comic, which appeals to Cohen’s taste for emotional
content and sense of the absurd.

“Anat loves being in the moment,” he says, “laughing and enjoying each other. And
that’s kind of what we’re after in that piece. There are times when it gets pretty
out [there], but there’s never any darkness in it.”

Sometimes the emotions in the group’s music do come from a darker place. “Goin’ 
Home,” a popular tune derived from Antonín Dvorák’s “New World Symphony,” became
part of the Quartetinho songbook after Cohen and bassist Christian McBride rendered
a duo version in September 2021 at a small ceremony at the Bronx gravesite of impresario
George Wein, who founded the Newport jazz and folk festivals.

“It stayed with me, and I said, ‘I want to bring it to Quartetinho,’” she recalls.

In adapting the piece, Cohen sought to suggest the scope of the original symphonic
version. As often happens with this quartet, the piece achieved its aims through
instrumental experimentation, eventually settling on a sonic blend that evokes the
string section by combining the sustained tones of Cohen’s bass clarinet, Vitor 
Gonçalves’ button accordion, Shipp’s tremulous vibraphone, and Tal Mashiach’s bowed
bass.

“It’s a big mass of sound,” Gonçalves says.

### **Not Braziliana**

After all the drones and long tones, the concert will move to a more percussive 
phase, with the music of Brazilian composers Egberto Amin Gismonti and Antônio Carlos
Jobim helping to set the pace. Brazilian music has been a strong component of Cohen’s
artistic profile for years, and Gonçalves, whom she met at jam sessions in his native
Rio de Janeiro more than 20 years ago, has helped build that profile.

As it happens, another Gonçalves from Rio, seven-string guitarist Marcello (no relation),
has also played a prominent role in that regard. During the pandemic lockdown, Cohen
spent more than a year with him in Rio. The result was the album _Reconvexo_, which
features tunes by Brazilians like Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento, and Jobim. The
album followed the duo’s Grammy-nominated release _Outra Coisa: The Music of Moacir
Santos_. Cohen has worked on many other Brazil-themed projects. “When I play the
clarinet, I can be myself.”  _— Anat Cohen_

Evidence of Cohen’s affinity for Brazilian music was prominent throughout her apartment.
Vinyl versions of _Reconvexo_ and _Outra Coisa_ were displayed on a window ledge,
and a cavaquinho — a small Portuguese guitar used throughout Brazil — shared space
with her clarinet atop the piano. At one point in the conversation, she picked up
the instrument and skillfully strummed a few bars.

Cohen’s Brazil connection is so strong these days that she can feel obliged to stress
the sweep of her experience, from duos playing mainstream jazz (she was paired with
pianist Fred Hersch in her last Lensic performance, in 2019) to small groups interpreting
the music of Benny Goodman (a 2009 Village Vanguard homage to the swing master yielded
a masterful album, _Clarinetwork_) to big bands trafficking in a militant modernism,
like that of Jason Lindner (the keyboardist in another Cohen quartet). “Triple Helix,”
the concerto from which the album of that title took its name, is classical in form
and eclectic in the musical idioms it incorporates.

Whatever Quartetinho’s Brazilian elements — and to be sure, it affixes a Portuguese
suffix to generate its name, which means “little quartet” — Cohen insists the band
not be classed simply as another foray into Braziliana. Nor, she adds, is it properly
termed “jazz.” Both contentions are bolstered by the group’s cross-fertilization
of influences and its multinational mix of players, which, in addition to the Brazilian(
Vitor Gonçalves), includes an American (Shipp), Cohen, and another Israeli (Mashiach).
The synthesis they create resists easy labels. Cohen prefers none.

None, perhaps, is needed. Suffice it to say that Cohen’s musical partners become
a kind of family, and in some cases are a literal one. Her brothers, trumpeter Avishai
Cohen and saxophonist Yuval Cohen, joined her in the 1990s and were among the first
wave of Israeli musicians to make a mark in the United States. Alone and together,
as the 3 Cohens, they have become major voices on the jazz scene.

They have also shared a musician: Mashiach, who studied with Yuval and played with
Avishai. It was, in fact, a 2014 gig with Avishai at the club Zappa in Herzliya,
Israel, where Mashiach first met Anat, when she sat in with the trumpeter’s group.
When Mashiach emigrated to the United States a few years later, he began playing
bass with Anat and has been part of her groups ever since, adding guitar to his 
arsenal for Quartetinho.

As the youngest member of the quartet and one raised in a rural district of Israel,
Mashiach, 29, brings to the music a “naïve” and “sweet” tone that tempers the others’
urban sensibility, Cohen says. That quality comes through in two of his compositions
adapted for Quartetinho — “The Old Guitar” (inspired by a Picasso painting) and “
Vivi and Zaco” (an homage to his grandfather).

Mashiach also brings perspective on the roots of Cohen’s musical interests, returning,
with some inevitability, to the subject of Brazil. He noted that youthful exposure
to Israeli producer Matti Caspi’s translation of Brazilian songs from Portuguese
to Hebrew fed her love of Brazilian music, as it did his. It is a love, he says,
shared by all of Quartetinho’s members — and one that helps foster a collective 
response to Cohen’s artistic impulses, a wide-ranging and unpredictable lot.

“Anat has always liked the freedom of not only stretching but also changing,” he
says. “She’s very dynamic onstage. She can go everywhere.”

#### ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL

Anat Cohen is one of the busiest artists in jazz. But recently, when the clarinetist
gave up her membership in Artemis after seven years with that all-woman supergroup,
she did not do so lightly.

“I love them,” she says. “It’s all good. It was just a schedule conflict. They needed
a commitment I couldn’t make, and I didn’t want to hold them back.”

For Cohen, the move was not the first of its type. A couple of decades ago, when
the Israeli native’s career in the United States was just taking hold, she joined
another estimable all-female band, the DIVA Jazz Orchestra. That relationship lasted
10 years before she became too busy to continue.

Her combined tenure with the two bands affords her an unusual perspective on female-
only ensembles specifically and women in jazz generally. And her assessment is at
best a mixed bag.

She says that, even before the #MeToo movement, there had been much talk about sexism
in jazz. She had participated in seminars on the subject at schools like Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) and was in touch with advocates like Terri Lyne Carrington,
who heads the Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice at the Berklee College of Music,
Cohen’s alma mater.

But for all the chatter and the very real promotion of women’s interests in some
quarters, gender parity remains elusive. Cohen’s own quartets have been almost exclusively
male, and only two members of her tentet are women. In part, the imbalance reflects
a smaller, if growing, pool of top female players than male players.

Expanding the pool means overcoming remaining prejudice. Despite abundant evidence
to the contrary, some musicians, particularly those who are older, still question
whether women are cut out to excel in jazz performance outside the realms of singing
and certain instruments. Saxophone, which Cohen plays along with the clarinet, is
not one of the instruments generally immune from such bias.

“There are still some narrow-minded people,” she says, “and for those unfortunate
individuals, we need to prove ourselves.”

The forming of all-female groups can be a double-edged sword. On one side, the groups
offer steady employment and camaraderie to their members. On the other, they appear
to reinforce the need for such groups and can give the impression that they are 
in some way gimmicks — a notion Cohen moves quickly to dispel.

“The first question people always asked,” she says, “was, ‘Why are you all women?’
Well, it happened to be all women, but we just really enjoyed the hang. And the 
goal wasn’t to be all women. It was to showcase excellence in music.”

1. Baroquen Spirit (3:56)
 2. Palhaço (8:21) 3. Boa Tarde Povo (4:58) 4. Birdie (
6:39) 5. Canon (3:06) 6. O Boto (6:25) 7. The Old Guitar (4:33) 8. Frevo (4:16) 
9. Louisiana (3:30) 10. Going Home (6:51) 11. Vivi & Zaco (4:23)

**ANAT COHEN: Clarinet, Bass Clarinet**
 **VITOR GONÇALVES: Piano, Accordion, Fender
Rhodes** **TAL MASHIACH: Bass, Guitar** **JAMES SHIPP: Vibraphone, Percussion, Glockenspiel,
Analog Synthesizer**

![Quartetinho | Anat Cohen](https://i0.wp.com/f4.bcbits.com/img/a0192098435_10.jpg?
w=640&ssl=1)

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