Variety is the spice of her music

When Anat Cohen was growing up in Tel Aviv, she traveled around the city listening to Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald on her Walkman. She began to play the clarinet at 12, then joined a Dixieland band and embarked on what has become a lifelong cross-cultural journey.

In the years since, Cohen has emerged as one of the brightest, most original young instrumentalists in jazz, playing saxophone and clarinet in no fewer than seven working bands and almost as many styles, from Brazilian music to Dixieland to modern jazz. Last month, she released two outstanding albums, each showing a different side of her musical personality.

"I don't know what is the music I enjoy most because I enjoy all of them," says Cohen, speaking from her home in New York. "I like variety. It keeps things interesting."

For six years, Cohen (whose first name is pronounced "a-NOT") has played tenor saxophone with Diva, a stellar all-female big band. The 32-year-old represents a growing international jazz movement, which is reflected in the lineup she joins Thursday for a "Women in Latin Jazz" program at the Jorge Hernandez Cultural Center. It includes Mexican percussionist Karina Colis, Brazilian singer-songwriter and guitarist Teresa Ines, US bassist and composer Bridget Kearney, Venezuelan percussionist and composer Ana Norgaard, and US pianist and composer Carmen Staaf.

Cohen's early interest in jazz came about largely through the influence of her family. "My father lived in the United States for 10 years, and he has a great passion for the American songbook," she says. "He had a big record collection and liked to play jazz and Frank Sinatra."

When she was about 9, her older brother, Yuval, took up the saxophone "and he immediately started to play jazz and the music of Charlie Parker."

It wasn't so unusual, then, that the teenage Anat would be playing Dixieland in Tel Aviv, followed by other enriching musical detours. At an arts high school in Tel Aviv, she intended to play classical clarinet, but it happened to be the same year the school introduced a jazz program. She picked up the tenor saxophone at 16 and chose Sonny Rollins and Dexter Gordon as her stylistic models.

"As I grew up," she says, "I wanted to go further back and check out the fathers of the saxophone. I listened to Illinois Jacquet , Jimmy Forrest , Lester Young, Ben Webster."

She learned her lessons well. Today, Cohen plays tenor with a huge, broad-shouldered tone that you hardly hear these days from anyone, male or female. Critic Nat Hentoff , who has been chronicling jazz since the 1940s, has written, "I hear the soul of Ben Webster in her tenor playing."

Cohen spent two years in an Israeli Air Force band, then came to Boston to attend the Berklee College of Music. Yuval was already at Berklee, and a younger brother, trumpeter Avishai, came later. Later this month, she'll fly to Israel for a pair of reunion concerts with her brothers. The "3 Cohens, " as they bill themselves, will put out their second joint album in September.

Meanwhile, Cohen and a business partner have launched a record label, Anzic, on which she has just released two remarkably accomplished recordings, "Noir" and "Poetica." On "Noir," she has assembled a crackerjack orchestra that includes eight horns, three cellos, guitar, drums, and percussion. The adaptable group segues from Cuban and Brazilian music to ballads and straight-ahead jazz -- sometimes in the same tune, as when the sinuous "Samba de Orfeu" dances right into the arms of Louis Armstrong's "Struttin' With Some Barbecue" without missing a step.

Early reviews of "Noir" suggest that it will be one of the finest jazz records of the year, thanks in large part to the arrangements by Cohen's childhood friend Oded Lev-Ari, which alternate from lush Gil Evans harmonies to hard-charging bebop to a laconic beauty that could accompany a moody European film.

Cohen plays three kinds of saxophone (soprano, alto, and tenor) on the album, as well as clarinet, which she had all but abandoned for several years. She has a strong, persuasive sound on each instrument -- her powerful tenor intro to "No Moon at All" practically blows down the doors -- but it is on clarinet that she brings something truly fresh and personal to jazz. You can hear it on the opening track of "Noir," "La Comparsa," by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona . It starts as a semi-classical chamber piece before Cohen takes over with a deep-toned clarinet solo that is buoyant and heartbreaking all at once -- and comes unmistakably from the Jewish klezmer tradition.

"I've never dedicated myself to klezmer," she says, "but growing up in Israel . . . it's naturally in my blood and just comes out."

Cohen plays clarinet exclusively on "Poetica," which includes several Israeli songs and original compositions, as well as a daringly reimagined version of saxophonist John Coltrane's "Lonnie's Lament."

"I really got a kick out of thinking, let's play it on clarinet," Cohen says. "Let's pay tribute to one of my idols without trying to imitate him."

By weaving strands of Israeli and South American music into traditional Dixieland and bebop, Cohen has expanded the vocabulary of jazz with a distinctive accent of her own. "I think it's important to stay open to different styles of music and to remember that music is music," she says.