Peter and Will Anderson, ‘Featuring Jimmy Cobb’ (Outside In Music Records)
‘The Andersons play the music of Henry Mancini’ (Symphony Space)

Here’s a pro tip: Never go to hear identical twin musicians in a venue where alcohol is being served. When Peter and Will Anderson started turning up in jazz clubs about 15 years ago, all of us encountering them for the first time had the same experience: Our immediate thought was that the cocktails were much stronger than we were accustomed to, because somehow we were seeing double. Was this one young saxophonist or actually two?  

Yet it wasn’t just what we were seeing, it was what we were hearing. This was about the time of the start of the “Nu Hot Jazz” movement, when young players who specialized in the earlier jazz styles were very much a rarity.  The two of them not only looked exactly alike — I can’t tell them apart to this day — but they both are virtuosos of multiple reed instruments, clarinet and various saxophones, who are equally comfortable in all the jazz styles from New Orleans to bebop and beyond.  

They’re not only two of a mind, but they are compatible enough in taste and temperament to have established one of the more overwhelmingly successful sibling jazz ensembles of our time. Peter and Will Anderson, who are now 35, also share a common entrepreneurial spirit: They’ve leapfrogged over a lot of existing bands in creating opportunities for jazz groups in institutions that don’t otherwise regularly present jazz.  

During the last few summers, the Andersons have transformed the Thalia — which stood for decades as the dumpiest cinema in New York, albeit one that presented the greatest classic movies and art films — into a West Side equivalent of the (East) 92nd Street Y. They’ve done a series of songwriter-centrics concerts driven not only by a great band, but 92Y-style historical context and plenty of powerpoint. 

On Saturday, the twins turned their focus to the music of Henry Mancini — a suitable subject for a converted movie theater. It’s also a copasetic theme for such an informal concert presentation, as the storied composer combined jazz, popular songwriting, and traditional film music into a cohesive and highly personal whole. The sextet featured the brothers, Will mostly on alto saxophone and Peter mostly on tenor, trumpeter Brandon Lee, pianist Dalton Ridenhour, drummer Alex Raderman, and the brothers’ long-time mentor and frequent employer, Vince Giordano, serving happily as a sideman while playing his distinctive aluminum bass.

The brothers know how to make an entrance: The Mancini concert commenced with the rhythm section onstage playing an indistinct vamp, and then they joined by playing the highly distinct theme to “Mr. Lucky.” The brothers wisely varied the mixture to illustrate the range of Mancini’s music, from the latinate polyrhythms of “A Touch of Evil” to the R&B underpinnings of “Peter Gunn” — even beyond that relentlessly funky ostinato intro, it could easily serve as a countermelody to “Night Train” — to the pan-African twists-and-turns of “Baby Elephant Walk.”  

The gifted pianist Dalton Ridenhour shined on a solo treatment of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” the oft-neglected main title theme for the 1961 Blake Edwards film. It’s lovely but neglected because it was overshadowed by the other gentle waltz featured in the film, “Moon River,” which was presented as a lovely duo between Peter Anderson on soprano saxophone and Mr. Ridenhour.  

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the most effective; other times the more complicated ones have merit, as when they closed the 90-minute show with another Academy Award winner, “Days of Wine and Roses.” They started in a slow ¾, but then took it out in a lively two-beat Dixieland style.

The Mancini show surely deserves to be an album. The brothers’ most recent release is one of several tributes to another venerated and now departed elder statesman with whom they worked, titled “Featuring Jimmy Cobb” and spotlighting the legendary drummer who died at 91 in 2020.  For this session, one of Cobb’s last, they teamed with a rhythm section accustomed to brotherly love, pianist Jeb Patton and bassist David Wong, long associated with the Heath Brothers. (And another nonagenarian master, Benny Golson, contributed the album liner notes.) 

The album is an upbeat mix of jazz and pop standards, along with a few originals, delivered in the Andersons’ characteristic bright, optimistic manner. Each of the brothers gets a standard ballad, Peter on tenor on “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and Will on alto on “Polka Dots and Moonbeams.” The album is more boppish than usual, and there are two Peter Anderson originals christened after their roots in jazz’s most fundamental source material, “Blues for You” and “Rhythm in F.” Duke Pearson’s hard bop anthem “Jeanine” fits easily into the brothers’ cheerfully modernist style. The concluding original, Will Anderson’s “I’ll Tell You Later,” pivots around a series of brilliantly executed double sax patterns.

The Andersons will soon be back in New York: Next week (August 24) they’re doing a trio night at Mezzrow with the formidable pianist Rossano Sportiello, and on September 6 they’ll launch a series of Tuesday evening shows at Birdland in celebration of the King of Swing, Benny Goodman. 

I remember well the first time I saw the Andersons: It was with the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra, at Dizzy’s in 2008. I haven’t touched a drop ever since.  My days of wine and roses are long behind me.