The 3 Cohens
‘Interaction,’ With the WDR Big Band
Anzic Records

Distinct among musicians, saxophone and reed players have a unique way of deporting themselves on stage. The great tenor player Lew Tabackin is one of them.

Not only is he wonderful to listen to, but I’ve always found it highly entertaining just to watch him in action. He has a knack for bobbing up and down in the middle of a solo — essentially dancing in place — to the extent that he’s making a visual statement as well as a musical one. 

On Saturday, before the big concert in the Appel Room, a young alto saxophonist named Emma Lacey led a quartet in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Etergun atrium; in her stance, the way she carried herself, she was very much a student of Mr. Tabackin.

Anat Cohen then took the stage at the Appel in an all-back outfit, her jet black hair and stylish ebony boots framing her slacks and a top. She’s much sleeker, much less zaftig, than when New Yorkers first heard her in the early editions of the Diva big band about a quarter-century ago. As with Mr. Tabackin, her body English is uninhibited and extroverted; from a distance, she looks like nothing so much as a giant clarinet, moving to her own music.

The Tel Aviv-born clarinetist and saxophonist gave four shows at Jazz at Lincoln Center this past weekend for multiple reasons: For one thing, she was launching an excellent new album, “Interaction,” on which the 3 Cohens — Anat and her two brothers, the older Yuval on soprano saxophone and the younger Avashi on trumpet — are joined by the WDR Big Band of Cologne; further, the new release celebrates the 20th anniversary of an all-jazz label, Anzic Records; and, not least, the performance was heralded as a celebration of Ms. Cohen’s 50th birthday. 

Whereas a show at Dizzy’s or Birdland is essentially one artist presenting one band, a program at a larger space like the Appel Room, Rose Hall, Carnegie Zankel, or 92NY is often a retrospective of different ensembles and projects in which an artist is involved.  Ms. Anat’s JALC presentation was a jam-packed 90-minute in-person “compilation” covering several different groups and about roughly 16 different players — one of whom was a surprise guest who emerged from the audience.

Part of the set involved Ms. Cohen’s Brazilian group; when most international jazz stars — particularly saxophonists like Stan Getz — wax Brazilian, they usually focus on the bossa nova. Ms. Cohen prefers the choro, an earlier South American style that served as a precursor to the music of Jobim and Gilberto. 

Choro is a generally faster, louder, and more dynamic style than bossa nova, but Ms. Cohen’s duets with Rio-born guitarist Marcello Gonçalves — the upbeat “Waiting for Amalia” and the more contemplative “Spanish Dance No. 2 (in c minor)” by the 19th century Catalan composer Enriquez Granados — were both thoughtful and engrossing. She ended this very satisfying set-within-a-show with Leonard Bernstein’s “America” in a jaunty 6/8, playing the call-and-response passages in the bridge as if in a conversation with herself.

When her brothers joined her, they played several tracks from the new album, starting with the New Orleans ur-standard “Tiger Rag”; Ms. Cohen’s solo shows that she fathoms well every jazz style from so-called dixieland to postmodernism. 

They complimented this with an equally well-considered update of Duke Ellington’s funky and bluesy “The Mooche,” and next threw a genuine bone to jazz history nerds in the house. Playing without the rhythm section, the three horns of the three Cohens lunged into another slice of ancient history, the 1917 “(Back Home Again in) Indiana,” which they played in a loose, heterophonic style; they gradually updated it into its modern jazz equivalent,“Donna Lee,” the bebop contrafact credited to Miles Davis. 

For the last act, Ms. Cohen was joined by an additional nine musicians, including the arranger and conductor Oded Lev-Ari. They started with “Triple Helix,” a concerto-like work that included elements of choro, for which Rio-born pianist Vitor Gonçalves doubled on accordion. They brought the evening to an epic climax with Ms. Cohen’s almost ecstatically lively parade march, “Footsteps and Smiles,” from the new album; this piece illustrates conclusively how much a Mardi Gras street parade through the French Quarter in New Orleans has in common with one from the streets of Rio de Janeiro.  

We not only had the full compliment of players that she calls “The Tentet,” in deference to Gerry Mulligan, but both her brothers and, rising like Venus from the ocean out of the third row in the house, the legendary Havana-born reed master Paquito D’Rivera brandishing his familiar redwood clarinet.

“Anat Cohen: Journeys – A 50th Birthday Celebration,” which is streaming through next Saturday, was an exemplary retrospective of a major artist in what is probably not even a career mid-point. As we gazed out the window and across the view of Columbus Circle, there wasn’t a soul in the house who wouldn’t have followed this band into the brisk early spring air if they had marched out the Appel Room and all the way down Central Park South.