A Musical World Traveler Who Likes to Mix Things Up

Anat Cohen’s quartet was playing jazz at the Jazz Standard on Wednesday night, and it was jazz that imported elements from the Middle East and South America and the language of early-20th-century classical music. That’s impressive, but not so surprising; those elements have all become moving parts in a jazz composer’s vocabulary. More curiously, it was jazz that behaved like pop — determined, encased in strong melodies and played at medium-full projection — and the musicians were articulating every note.

The clarinetist Anat Cohen led a jazz quartet, occasionally augmented by a string quartet, at the Jazz Standard on Wednesday night.

But one of the possible refinements for a young jazz group is to take things away, put some spaces in the notes and phrases and test the elasticity of the band. Playing music from Ms. Cohen’s new album “Poetica” (Anzic), her band created a sound that felt carved in stone, a little inflexible, with an almost full-body impact.

Ms. Cohen, an Israeli musician who came to New York in 1999, has been a valuable part of the local jazz scene ever since: playing lead tenor saxophone with the all-female Diva Jazz Orchestra, playing Louis Armstrong’s music with David Ostwald’s Gully Low Jazz Band, playing Brazilian choro and samba with local bands and getting into the thick of the new mainstream jazz, sometimes with her brothers Avishai, the trumpeter, and Yuval, the pianist.

In many ways she’s an ideal: well prepared, passionately literate in music far outside her local circle, an improviser with gusto. She understands how dance rhythms leaven and quicken jazz; her piece “La Casa del Llano,” moving between five-beat and two-beat bounces, was tight with energy. And she has a full, even, unsqueaking tone, especially on the clarinet, an instrument that could use another distinctive voice in jazz.

Ms. Cohen played only clarinet on Wednesday. (The night before, at the same club, she had played saxophone with a whole other show of ambition: a 14-piece orchestra, performing music from her other new record, “Noir.”) Between Jason Lindner’s steady vamps and inside-the-piano thumping, Omer Avital’s big, woody bass notes and Daniel Freedman’s drum grooves, the rhythm section felt heavy, almost battering. This was offset by the appearance of a string quartet, playing arrangements written by Mr. Avital, and in the presence of the strings the jazz quartet reduced itself. For a version of John Coltrane’s “Lonnie’s Lament,” the string players usefully deepened the harmony implied in the original piece; for the Israeli song “Ein Gedi” — rendered as pastoral classical music — they were the music itself, with the rhythm section dropping out completely.

During her solo in “Lonnie’s Lament” Ms. Cohen intimated her strength as a soloist, shifting into double time over the ballad tempo, lengthening improvised phrases at will and leaving a few holes. Here, in her ability to alter what was already there and shift the music’s focus to revision and reinvention, lay the promise of the band.

The Anat Cohen Quartet will perform tonight at the Kennedy Center in Washington.