This year I was lucky enough to attend the 11^th Annual Newport Jazz Party and not only hear some amazing music but interview some of our most talented (if not best known) jazz musicians. In the next few weeks I will be airing these interviews and playing cuts from each musicians CD’s.

• Anat Cohen
• Holly Hoffman
• Graham Dechter

3-15-11 Anat Cohen

Like her two brothers Anat Cohen is a jazz musician – she plays clarinet and saxophone. Music was always a part of her family life and her parents, who spent years chauffeuring their three children back and forth to lessons and concerts, never suggested that they find another way to spend their lives. For Anat music is not simply her work, it “is never not a part of my life.” When you watch and listen to Anat play you can feel her joy, see that the music inhabits her body – she is one with it. And not only the music she is playing but the music others are playing around her. Although she admits that making a life with music can be challenging – “the source of her pleasure and her misery,” – it is worth whatever sacrifice she makes for it – and we, as her audience, are grateful that she does. Listen to cuts from Anat’s CD “Notes From The Village.”