By CHARLES J. GANS, Associated Press Writer 20 minutes ago NEW YORK - Anat Cohen s clarinet wailed like a woman scorned, dispensing with any need for a vocalist as she played the soulful 1950s torch song “Cry Me A River” with her Anzic Orchestra during a recent jazz club run that saw her perform with four of her bands. On tenor saxophone, Cohen has a big sound she can both growl and play softer and more lyrically that goes all the way back to pre-bebop Swing Era players.

But it s her lovely, fluid clarinet playing that has established her as one of most promising young jazz instrumentalists. This year she was voted Rising Star Clarinet in Downbeat magazine s critics poll and received two awards from the Jazz Journalists Association as Clarinetist of the Year and Up and Coming Musician. “I ve been playing Cry Me A River for a little while now and I can really express my feelings with the clarinet.

You can really scream up there or you can be very gentle, very sensual, and you can be kind of mean.” That gig capped a breakthrough year for the 32-year-old Cohen. This summer, Cohen made her debut at the Newport Jazz Festival and became the first Israeli and the first female horn player to headline at New York s legendary Village Vanguard jazz club. Cohen began playing clarinet at age 12 in a Dixieland band in an after-school program at a Tel Aviv conservatory.

Her teachers in the newly inaugurated jazz program at Israel s Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts encouraged her to focus on the tenor saxophone. But a teacher at Berklee, Phil Wilson, recognized that she had her own voice on the clarinet. “Coming from Israel, I heard klezmer but I never really tried to immerse myself in it.