San Francisco -- It's hard to keep track of all the brilliant young Israeli jazz musicians on the scene these days. Three of New York's finest -- trumpeter Avishai Cohen, his woodwind-playing sister Anat Cohen and bassist Omer Avital -- will dig into a rich range of music Saturday on a San Francisco Jazz Festival bill at Congregation Sherith Israel. The concert pairs Avishai's bracing new trio, Triveni, featuring Avital and drummer Obed Calvaire (subbing for regular drummer Nasheet Waits), and Anat's prime quartet. It features pianist Jason Linder, an adventurous composer and bandleader who was at the center of the scene at Smalls, the Greenwich Village club that in the 1990s became a hub for creative young musicians who draw freely on music they love: bebop and funk, Latin, Middle Eastern and African grooves. The Cohens, who grew up in Tel Aviv, were part of that scene, moving to New York after studying at Boston's Berklee College of Music in the late 1990s. 'Any given week, I would play in a Brazilian (i(choro(/i(band, then the music of Louis Armstrong, Venezuelan music, and with the Jason Linder big band,' Anat Cohen says. 'It was all part of my routine. For me, it comes naturally. 'I have a lot of friends from different parts of the world who love jazz. They bring songs and sounds they grew up with, using a jazz approach to improvise and interact. It's all music. The secret is to stop separating it. Our approach is, let's stretch, let's improvise, let's create music right now.' A smashing clarinetist and saxophonist, Anat was a classically trained, jazz-crazy kid who walked to school listening to Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald on her Walkman, and as a teenager played in the Dixieland band at the Jaffa Conservatory of Music. She's equally adept improvising on songs by Coltrane, Sam Cooke, Fats Waller, and the Cuban composer Ernesto Lecouna. In San Francisco, backed by bassist Joe Martin and drummer Daniel Freedman -- the only non-Israeli in the global-minded Third World Love quartet co-led by Avishai -- Anat will play some of that material, as well as originals and a Benny Goodman tune or two from her latest disc, 'Clarinetwork: Live at the Village Vanguard.' She'll also play something with her brother, with whom she performs in the band 3 Cohens, which features their older brother Yuval, a noted saxophonist who lives in Tel Aviv. 'As kids, we used to jam in the house all the time,' says Avishai Cohen, a fluent and soulful trumpeter who began touring with the Young Israeli Philharmonic at 10 but focused on jazz after falling under the sway of Charlie Parker, Armstrong, Coltrane and Miles Davis. Moving to New York, 'really opened me up musically,' says Cohen, 32, whose friends turned him on to Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix and West African music. 'I was a jazz snob,' he says. 'I remember the day I finally understood what was so great about Bob Marley. I was listening to a lot of Coltrane. It seemed so magical to me I couldn't listen to any other jazz. But when I had to take a break from Coltrane, I listened to Bob Marley. I went back and forth. I realized they're not too far apart -- they're both screaming the truth. I wanted to find a way to the truth as well, which I'm still working on.' After writing music for larger ensembles that required a lot of rehearsal -- the musicians on his multi-hued 2007 CD, 'After the Rain,' included African-born guitarist and singer Lionel Loueke -- Cohen wanted to get back to playing open, improvised music with a trio. The simple themes he wrote can be played the first-time out. Triveni, a Sanskrit word meaning 'the meeting point of three sacred rivers,' is a metaphor 'for three musicians coming together from similar and very different places to create something,' he says. 'The written music is just a suggestion; it creates a vibe, or a style that sets up the improvisation and interaction. Jazz is always about communication.' Anat has a few theories about why there are so many good jazz musicians coming out of Israel. There's the music education system, which provides 'a good foundation in classical music and now in jazz. People have a need for this expression. It's a very tense place. You can say what's on your mind through music. A lot of people try to avoid conflict and politics, and music is just an obvious place to go.' Avishai offered another explanation. 'The swing is in the humus,' he jokes. [] E-mail Jesse Hamlin at pinkletterssfchronicle.com. 