The Odyssey of Anat Cohen

We are all – man and woman, child and beast – pilgrims here on earth. No matter where or when we are born, or where we live. No matter what we do for a living or where we worship. We migrate chronologically from a body with a finite age to another with a newly finite age. Or we may migrate geographically from one end of the earth to another – a tropical landmass to a temperate one…

And time unfolds in a linear spiral as we participate in the odyssey of our life. And in journeying so, we remember old things voices from the past and songs sung by our anscestors. The dances we danced; the psalms we sang. As we worshiped we carried the spirit in us – sometimes comatose until it woke us up again. Then it opened our mind’s eye as we shape-shifted into beings of our new culture and civilizations.

Ours is the Human Diaspora that came forth from the breath of God as Pithecanthropus Erectus walked on twos and began the first odyssey that would no one could stop.  We moved in fear and joy. We heard the cry and danced towards it. We moved to the beat of the log drum and the trees rustling in the wind. We mimiced the sounds that we heard and soon we strung sounds together as we best could remember the songs of the wind and the dance of the animals we raised. The heavens became the design guide: stars like necklaces, sounds like the stars like necklaces. Drums we beat as we hunted and gathered. Drums we beat as we settled and defended our desolate hamlets… our homes… against plundering hoardes and savage invaders of the heart.

And then as we conquered and hurtled through time and space – top new land and new space we sometimes forgot joy and remembered only sorrow. And then we longed for a place where we could live without fear of being dispossessed. So we began to journey again. Sometimes we did so in our heads; at other times in our hearts and souls. Our ships were real and imagined. Sails billowed on swart ships, no matter what where the wind brought us. We had journeyed again transported perhaps – out of body – into the spirit world. The Human Diaspora on the inevitable and unstoppable move again.

This time we managed to bring not just the voices of strugglers from the desert, but we also remembered the psalms of old, of our flight through the long night into the bright sunlight. And we remembered the songs of our ancestors and fashioned reeds – brass and horns to play them and remember the minute details of the journey, this exodus froim a long night into the light of a glorious day.

We remembered and glorified everything in poem, song and dance… we remembered the lion and the cobra. And we played and sang and exhalted the triumph of the journey – griot and priest, painter and poet… trobadour and musician. Our reeds were aflame with the excitement of adventure and the stories to tell of the spirits whom we met and of our trials and tribulations and of our blues and, soon of our joys as well.

The poem and the song and the dance was indellibly imprinted on the canvas of that painting became the mirror. The poem and the song and the dance became the enactment of the saeta, and the alegria in the soul. The history of a people recorded in art. John Coltrane recorded this in A Love Supreme and Meditations and in Ascension in “The Father, Son and The Holy Ghost.” Mingus saw it all as he crafted “Meditations on Integration.” And then Alice Coltrane re-discovered the road less travelled when she was inspired to write and record Journey to Sacchitananda. Let’s not forget Pharoah Sanders’ Journey to Love, Tembi and Journey to Home.

And let’s remember Anat Cohen, who emerged from behind the curtain of the Human Diaspora like a secret wind rustling up some rhythmic magic as she wielded a gleaming black clarinet or a warmly glowing tenor saxophone. She sang in her pied piper voice soft and wafting on a flue of air firm and without much vibrato. The woody lyrical inflections of the notes of her clarinet hung heavy, suggestive and breathlessly sensuous.  A quick switch to tenor and the notes, phrases and long loping lines turned more granular as she came close to groaning the blues and growling an apocalyptic shout.  Her soprano wail could be high and mighty. But then down she would swoop down to earth painting a narrative picture of the home she had left behind… saudades and a promise of alegria when she returned – albeit in her mind’s eye – to a house on a hill, perhaps…

A cry of longing

In addition, when the music moved her to tears she could capture in quick sketches, with gusting breath and sinewy elegance her journey from the land of her birth to the land promised to her should she choose to sound a prophetic phrase in praise of this human migration. This she chose to do in the idiom of The Music forever inflected with the unmistakable ululation of the weeping desert wind as it blew uncertainly across that beautiful land.

Something unique has happened here. I have been touched not just by the sounds of Cohen’s music – I have been touched by the hidden spirit guides as the notes sound solitarily, in the synchopated syntax that tumbles wistfully from the horn of the tenor, accenting the melancholy with the odd flurry of notes that daly and hang with magical sadness. “Place and Time” is a song that comes from Anat Cohen’s first eponymously entitled first record as leader. The choice of instrument sings boldly of a long journey taken, away from home. The possibility of not looking back, much less looking back looms large in the melody with moves from wistfullness to bright resolution.

I discovered recently – about a decade ago – that my friend from the toddler days of childhood, Julian Askenazey and his sister Becky were my only connection with my favorite part of Israel. I found that my late aunt Margot Barenboim had been a child of Auschwitz. A soldier of the guard was moved by her and helped her to escape. She found her way to England, married my father’s brother and that gave me the closest bloodline to Israel. My Israeli family continues to live in the Sinai and because the paternal side of my family is Brasilian I am sure that my cousins there understand the true meaning – Biblical or otherwise – of saudades and of alegria and the chorinho will instantly echo in their hearts when the moon carries a song there.

Place and Time has a special place in my heart and soul. It is all about that first and final wrench away from the blood of the land that nurtured your human soul.  In 1999 Anat Cohen took this soul and opened her innermost, heartfelt feelings to it. Her soul was in bloom. Cohen was able to become the channel for its yearnings, memories and bright beacons that shed light on the way forward.

Tellingly – and this is something many miss – the music that swirls around the land of Isreal/Palestine/Holy Land, whatever you want to call it – Oasis of Peace – is what I prefer having imbibed its ancient history and vivid spirit for thirteen years. What we miss is that rich confluence of cultural interaction that has always been alive for thousands of years before we allowed ourselves to become brainwashed – slaves to colonialism.  We forgot, for instance the 12 tribes who gathered here brought riches beyond imagination. As the Diaspora gathered there came song praise from early European music, then Ethopian and more African and also India – as that part of the diaspora grew… folk music from far and wide – as north as Russia and as Far west as Latin America.

In this stew, Anat Cohen has an epiphany: the musician communed with a Sufi master, a saint and musician who positted that “Rhythm cannot exist without tone, nor tone without rhythm. They are interdependent from their existence, and it is the same with time and space,” said the great Hazrat Inayat Khan.

This might not be obvious in Anat Cohen’s music at the first listening. But then soon “Place and Time” gives over to “The 7^th of March,” a song conceived with heavy heart and a gentle eulogy. It is undeniably a dirge that provokes a lump in the throat just as does “Goodbye Porkpie Hat.” There is also a certain warmth and empathy that swathes Cohen for song from faraway Cuba – “Veinte Años.” The   elemental sadness of the inner melody translates almost imperceptably into Jewish folk music. And “Homeland”  contains music that breathes heavily with the unmistakable feeling of “saudades.”

Even in the delightful “Bat-El,” a musical portrait of a childhood friend, the returns to improvised parts at the end of the song, surprisingly, beautifully and most tantalisingly beautiful, you sense a reluctance to let go, until the fade away of the reeds in the wind suggest a complete turnaround.

Exploring the poetry of sound

Poetica, that daring record perhaps started as something tongue-in-cheek, by her own admission. Kept apart from that svelte, woody sound that Anat Cohen loved as a young musician finding her voice. Cohen took the proverbial leap into the unknown: To do a record expressing herself – her new, accelerating confidence in an instrument that perhaps best captured the sound she envisioned a human voice to be. This is a journey that Cohen undertakes completely with a clarinet.

The repertoire that is chosen for the occasion is truly inspired, though not so much the almost ethereal presence of the clarinet in tone and manner throughout the record. First off, here is an instrument that seems to capture – in its hot and sometimes softly granular tone – the enigma of departures and arrivals especially out of the desert. Admittedly it was almost a decade away from the land of her birth. But some memories sleep deep in the mind of the brain and these may awaken at the simple recollection of the salty smell of the sea tumbling in harness. And then there is the rustle of palms dry and dusty from a hot sandy wind, or simply the memory of an old hag singing to her crying child… as a familiar melody escapes through lips that hide a toothless mouth.

This is what sets Poetica apart. As a musical document, it describes the exquisite poetry of nostalgia, of a life left behind, but not forgotten. The repertoire is a collection of old songs that Cohen literally “cries” out of her clarinet. “Agada Yapanit (A Japanese Tale)” is a sweeping molten water color of a song that waxes and wanes lyrically and remains like a moist parchment long after the last notes fade. “Hofim (Beaches)” and “Nigunim (Melodies)” recall a simple life of such ethreal beauty that the music is almost glacial in its depicting of the scenes. “Eyn Gedi,” that sweeping visual – complete with the string quartet – almost brings with it fine red sand that gently stings the face before the cool of the evening sets in.

Poetica is also the record where the caravans of migrating cultures collide. Whether it be the paths France of old lovers crossing in Jacques Brel’s “La Chanson des Vieux Amants,” Anat Cohen observes and comments with superb sensitivity. Similarly, Cohen finds a perfect timbral expression for the longing for loves paths to cross in the heat of Brasil with Nelson Cavaquinho’s “Quando Eu Me Saudade,” as she breathlessly brings this longing to an almost spiritual resolution.

It all comes together in the pianistic excursions of Jason Lindner, anchored by Omer Avital on bass, with Daniel Freedman and Gilad sharing percussion duties. The gentle, ruminating drama of the event is perfectly captured in the whispering strings on some of the tracks that grace this memorable album.

By now the odyssey of Anat Cohen is taking a turn that will reveal a sharp new direction. For several years after her sojourn to the USA, she felt especially drawn to the music of South America – the Latin Diaspora with its dense cultural folliage, and Amazonian splendour that represented, in many ways, the collision of all cultures – old and new. Brasil, for instance became the melting pot of form and musical adventure. Finding that her sense of longing was reflected in the sense of “saudades” almost reflected the sense and expectation of parallel paths perhaps meeting at infinity.

The Choro seemed a perfect fit. And Anat Cohen dived in headfirst. Together with Pedro Ramos, Gustavo Dantas, Carlos Almeida and Ze Mauricio, Anat Cohen found a medium to express her inner sorrows and joys. After all, the “Chorinho” was a perfect setting to express the sense of loss (of home, albeit purposeful) and gain. Cohen could now tell the stories and share the innermost feelings in a form that allowed the greatest leeway and she sang this with great facility. The choro, “Cade a Chave,” that she wrote for the Choro Ensemble album, Nosso Tempo (Anzic, 2007) is a wonderful example of her fluency with the form.

Through a glass darkly

A year earlier Anat Cohen had made what could very possibly be her most ambitious album to date – an orchestral feature Noir (Anzic, 2006), designed to display her incredibly diverse sensibilities and virtuosic skills on all the major saxophones (except the baritone) and the clarinet. The gorgeous sweep of the record has as much to do with the feeling for tonal coloration and sensitivity to the nuances of timbral magic that Oded Lev-Ari brought to the arrangements and their superb interpretation by a galaxy of stellar musicians, including Cohen’s elder siblings, trumpeter and flugelhorn player, Avishai and soprano saxophonist, Yuval. Noir traverses the musical idiom of the Mediterranean, Africa, Spain, Cuba, Brasil, and America. However, it is in the rhythms of Latin America that Cohen’s craft comes truly alive. That and this fact: Noir explores the darker elements of song – sadness, loss, unrequited love and longing – with an intensity that only lightened up because darkness-to-light is inevitable in Anat Cohen’s world. The interpretations of songs such as Johnny Griffin’s “Do It,” “Cry Me a River” and especially “You Never Told Me That You Care” is a complete surprise from the pen of Sun Ra and a Mingus favorite, Hobart Dobson. All music is open to a certain element of improvisation in the expression of the composers’ intent, but these tracks seem definitive in a realm so infinite, that it may be well nigh impossible to capture their beauty again.

Braid (Anzic, 2007) was a project by the 3 Cohens. It fell somewhere in between Noir and Nosso Tempo, both of which were released in 2007, although the music on Noir was laid down almost a year earlier – a month before Braid was recorded. Braid is a confluence of three voices – the voices of the Cohens. All three – trumpeter and flugelhorn player, Avishai and soprano saxophonist, Yuval join Anat, who brings her tenor saxophone to this recording (and plays clarinet on one song). The record is a musical tapestry – almost a patchwork quilt – on which three disparate instruments and voices intersect using a variety of idioms. The melodic ingenuity of the musicians is beyond doubt, but it is the harmonic daring and the rhythmic creativity that makes the album unforgettable.

On “Freedom,” a song by Yuval Cohen, the group navigates a labyrinthine melody and the rapid rhythmic changes at blinding speed. They do so again on Avishai Cohen’s “Shoutin’ Low,” a riotous frolic in a myriad of tempos with no set pulse. Again, it bears mention that the Cohens shoot across the soundscape like stratospheric birds singing in criss crossing harmonies that rise and fall as they streak through the song. The track, based on the changes and harmonics of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Groovin’ High” is a masterpiece of altered changes. On Braid, the Cohens bump and grind, and strut their stuff delightfully. Anat Cohen opens out to display her warm, almost singing sound. Avishai Cohen inhabits the edge of the habitable universe of sound and can wax eloquent through a ballad with as much facility as he can roar through bebop rhythm. In addition, Yuval Cohen calls upon his muse with a full, round soprano saxophone tone. However, the record really soars when the three, with pianist Aaron Goldberg, bassist Omer Avital and the incredible Eric Harland on drums push hard at the convention of sound with contrapuntal ingenuity.

With clave in her soul

It has been clear for some time now, that the clarinet and an array of saxophones, at the hands of Anat Cohen, are such powerful instruments that they can alter the state of mind. Such a phenomenon happened once again on Notes from the Village, her fourth and utterly bewitching record. Her reputation in the ocean of contemporary music long since established this part of her odyssey finds Anat Cohen on a rarified plane as she explores the entire breadth of the tonal values of the reeds and woodwinds. Her notes and phrases may take great spritely leaps, or may hang heavy with emotion. When she dapples some notes with splashes of subtle shades and rhythmic accents, she shows how she has mastered each instrument – twisting the yin and yang out of them. Anat Cohen has a clave hidden in her soul!

Notes from the Village occupies a large musical canvas. Cohen traverses a soundscape from the exuberant rhythms of Africa — “Washington Square Park” — with Jason Lindner’s piano and electronics and Gilad Hekselman’s guitar taking center-stage in the wildly exciting musical journey that criss-crosses the primal and the pastoral. “Until You’re In Love Again” contours a dirge-like mood from the depths of the soul, but ends up quite exultant in the end. Ernesto Lecuona’s mystical “Siboney” is a tour de force that channels the true heart of Cuban son. On John Coltrane’s exquisite ballad, “After The Rain,” arrangers Lindner and Cohen have slowed the tempo of the piece to reflect an almost glacial image of wet earth.  In a masterstroke, Anat Cohen chose the bass clarinet to communicate a mood in which peace has returned to earth just as the water that returned to the skies. “J Blues” is gut wrenching, and elevating. Here Anat Cohen hits the bent, blue notes with elemental sadness as Lindner and bassist Omer Avital solo with brilliant inventiveness.

The record approaches its conclusion with a piercing, heart-stopping composition “Lullaby for the Native Ones,” a song so fraught with dynamic tension that is built with such precision by Cohen’s tenor saxophone that it literally explodes on the consciousness when it is done and the new arrangement of Sam Cooke’s “Change is Gonna Come” is almost a welcome relief! Moreover, just when you thought that the level of dynamism could not reach any greater height, Cohen and her group turn in a magnificently boppish version of the Fats Waller classic, “Jitterbug Waltz”. Played at a daring pace and with almost Mingus-like shifts in rhythm, this concluding track is perhaps the most extraordinary arrangement of Waller’s composition since Eric Dolphy turned it inside out in his iconic 60s version. Notes from the Village highlights the talent of Anat Cohen in a much smaller group setting than Noir, but the ocean of sound is magnificently expansive.

Every once and awhile – on every project she touches  be it the records as leader, or her work with the Choro  Ensemble, or even the fabulous 3 Cohens record she made – Anat Cohen provides a clue as to where we might find the joy of a soaring soul. It is a space where tone and rhythm come together – if not as one, then in a double helix. Therefore, intertwined, tone and rhythm become one molten whole in time and space, as the great Sufi musician proposed and found.

On Time and Place, it hovers and swirls about in the music of “The 7^th of March” and in the lament, “Pour Toi.” On Poetica there is a whole cycle of songs, from “Hofim” to “Nigunim,” “Eyn Gedi” and “Agada Yapanit.” There is a subtle, but significant difference on Noir, where this soulful searching is everywhere. However, in Noir, that unity of time and space, tone and rhythm comes through on “You Never Told Me That You Care.” Braid has it and the song is “Tfila (Prayer).”

Finally in Notes from the Village, in the spiritual wandering of musician, as the ship comes ashore, you feel the magnificent Sufism of Anat Cohen almost omnipresent. It comes in waves – on “Until You’re In Love Again”and “Siboney.” Then it gets stronger and stronger – on tracks like “After the Rain” and becomes dynamically intense on “Lullaby for the Naïve Ones.”

The Odyssey is probably far from over, but in the music of Anat Cohen, especially in those elected to push her soul deeper into meaningful territory. Moreover, even though we all know that our limited minds and hearts cannot engage in the infinite possibilities of our individual journeys, we hear God, in the silence of our hearts, and as He whispers, we become aware that there are ways of reaching beyond ourselves. Anat Cohen certainly has and there is the music to testify. “I am seeking you, my soul is thirsting for you, my flesh is longing for you, Cohen’s musical voice may say, “… a land parched and weary and waterless may lie ahead – who knows – but I find you in that masterful union of tone and rhythm in time and space.

Anat Cohen on the web: www.anatcohen.com

Feature written by: Raul da Gama