The Anzic Orchestra is the large ensemble that clarinetist and saxophonist Anat Cohen and the arranger Oded Lev-Ari assembled in New York in 2006, named after the record label the two of them had started the year before. It exists on record exactly once, on Cohen's Noir, and it went on to work as a live band for roughly three years after that. It is a big band with two deliberate substitutions: there is a guitar where the piano would be, and a section of three cellos where a conventional orchestral date would put violins and violas. Lev-Ari wrote every chart and conducted.

Anzic Records had launched in 2005 with Cohen's Place & Time. Cohen and Lev-Ari had known each other since they were classmates at the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts outside Tel Aviv, and they set the label up with a third partner, Colin Negrych; the name is the first syllable of "Anat" welded to the second syllable of "music." By 2006 Cohen wanted a large-ensemble record and Lev-Ari had the charts for it, so the two of them booked a band. Nineteen players are named on the resulting sleeve, drawn from the working New York pool: Ted Nash and Scott Robinson from the Jazz at Lincoln Center orbit, the cellist Erik Friedlander from the downtown scene, the Brazilian drummer Duduka Da Fonseca and guitarist Guilherme Monteiro, Ali Jackson and Antonio Sanchez splitting the drum chair, and a group of Israelis around Cohen that included both her brothers, trumpeter Avishai Cohen and soprano saxophonist Yuval Cohen, the bassist Barak Mori and the trombonist Jonathan Voltzok.

Noir was cut in two days, August 29 and 30, 2006, at Avatar Studios in New York, engineered by Dave O'Donnell. James Farber mixed it at Avatar that October and Greg Calbi mastered it at Sterling Sound in November. Anzic released it on April 3, 2007 as catalog number Anzic 1201, on the same day as Cohen's small-group record Poetica (Anzic 1301), so that the two sides of what she was doing arrived together. Dan Morgenstern wrote the liner notes and the sleeve carries a cover painting by Paul G. Oxborough. The ten-track program is a wide sweep rather than an original-music statement: Ernesto Lecuona's "La Comparsa," the Cape Verdean "Carnaval de São Vicente," Johnny Griffin's bop line "Do It," a Sun Ra and Hobart Dotson ballad, the Tin Pan Alley staples "No Moon at All," "Cry Me a River" and Johnny Ray's "Cry," a medley pairing Luiz Bonfá's "Samba de Orfeu" with Lil Hardin Armstrong's "Struttin' with Some Barbeque," and choro and Brazilian pieces by Pixinguinha and Hermeto Pascoal to close.

The band's public debut came three months after the record. From July 2 to 8, 2007 the Anzic Orchestra played a full week at the Village Vanguard, taking the Monday night that normally belongs to the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra on the opening date. It kept working intermittently after that. On the strength of those dates it was booked for the 14th Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival at the Kennedy Center, held May 14 to 16, 2009, on a bill with Dee Dee Bridgewater as host, Esperanza Spalding, Carmen Lundy and the Maria Schneider Orchestra. The orchestra bused down from New York for what NPR's Becca Pulliam called its first performance in a national theater, and the set was broadcast on NPR's JazzSet on October 1, 2009. The live sixteen-piece kept the record's shape (three saxophones, three trumpets, two trombones, three cellos, guitar, bass, drums and percussion behind Cohen) with new faces in the reed chairs, among them Jaleel Shaw on alto and Chris Karlic on baritone alongside Billy Drewes, who had been on the album. The program drew on Noir and added two things that were not on it: a pairing of Compay Segundo's "Marie en la Playa" with Irving Berlin's "Puttin' on the Ritz," and a closing "Oh! Baby" written for the Benny Goodman centennial, which Lev-Ari took to calling "Oy! Baby."

No second album followed, and the name was not used again. What continued was the idea behind it. Lev-Ari kept the cello section for his own debut as a leader, Threading (Anzic, 2015), a smaller ensemble with Cohen on clarinet, three cellos and Matt Wilson on drums. In 2016 he and Cohen built the Anat Cohen Tentet, with Lev-Ari as musical director, a group they describe as the smallest large ensemble they can imagine; it debuted at the Jazz Standard and Newport in 2017, made Happy Song that year and the Grammy-nominated Triple Helix in 2019. Lev-Ari's return to a conventional big band came only in 2022, with the 3 Cohens and Cologne's WDR Big Band, recorded at the Kölner Philharmonie on June 16 that year and released as Interaction in 2025. He has said plainly that he had sidestepped standard big-band writing for two decades by adding cellos, starting with the Anzic Orchestra charts for Noir.

The Anzic Orchestra's sound is Lev-Ari's writing plus one structural decision. Dropping the piano for Guilherme Monteiro's guitar takes the block chords out from under the horns, and putting three cellos where the violins would go loads the middle and lower registers instead of floating a string cushion on top, which is why the band sounds warm rather than plush. Lev-Ari has named Nelson Riddle's orchestral charts for Frank Sinatra as the model he was reaching for, a modified big band rather than a straight one, and the record bears that out: the horns are scored as a section when weight is wanted and thinned to two or three voices behind Cohen the rest of the time. The material is Latin American and Tin Pan Alley in roughly equal measure, with Cohen taking most of the solo space on four instruments; Jack Bowers, reviewing it for All About Jazz in March 2007, heard traces of Sonny Rollins and Ben Webster in her tenor and of Zoot Sims in her soprano, and singled out solos by Drewes, Nash, Robinson, Voltzok, Monteiro and both of Cohen's brothers. DownBeat gave the record four stars, Audiophile Audition's John Henry gave it five, and Morgenstern's liner note credit for Lev-Ari as an arranger of skill and originality has followed the album ever since. Cohen's later Tentet, and the Interaction charts for the WDR Big Band, both descend directly from what was worked out here.