Turtle Island String Quartet:
Recombinant (musical) DNA
March 17, 2008Pigeon holes may be OK for pigeons when they have nothing to do, but those walls just get in the way of the acts that produce new pigeons. The advancement of the musical species, too, requires musicians, composers and listeners to cross-fertilize outside their assigned boxes.
That's what happened when the Turtle Island String Quartet visited Temple Beth-El on Sunday to play arrangements of pieces by John Coltrane, or otherwise connected to jazz traditions, for the San Antonio Chamber Music Society. Was it jazz? Was it classical? Was it both? Was it neither? Does it matter?
The Turtle Islanders' deft, seamless weave of idioms served as a timely antidote to the dyspepsia induced by the San Antonio Symphony's recent "Music of Led Zeppelin" concert. The idea was not to reproduce or "enhance" the jazz originals, but to create something new by merging and reorganizing genetic material from several sources -- Trane's meandering tunes, his highly advanced modal approach to improvisation, the stirng quartet's sonorities, the European compositional techniques within which string quartets have traditionally played.
The arrangements, nearly all by current Turtle Island members, were composed works that left room for extended solo improvisations and improvised responses, somewhat in the manner of the baroque period. There was some variance in compositional approach. The arrangements by violinist David Balakrishnan (of Coltrane's "Naima" and the suite "A Love Supreme," as well as one original work) seemed more informed (or perhaps constrained) by the textures and harmonies of the 20th-century European Modern mainstream than those by cellist Mark Summer (Coltrane's "Moment's Notice") and violinist Mads Tolling (Stanley Clarke's "Song for John" and Richard Rodgers's "My Favorite Things," a favorite Coltrane vehicle). But all the arrangements were intelligent, well-structured and sufficiently new and complex to stand on their own merit as original works.
All four players displayed splendid improvisational chops. Summer's exuberant plucking and slapping seemed the most fully steeped in the jazz spirit, but Balakrishna produced plenty of hot licks of his own. Turtle Island's newest member, violist (and sometimes violinist) Jeremy Kittel, deliciously integrated bluesy bent notes into a non-vibrato playing style that would have been entirely at home in a Bach partita. Tolling did a solo turn in his own "Danish Dessert," a richly layered dancelike piece that sometimes echoed the rhythmic patterns of speech from his native Denmark. The program also held excellent uncredited arrangements of Dave Brubeck's "The Duke" (a tribute to Duke Ellington), Paquito d'Rivera's "Wapango" and Leonard Bernstein's "Cool."
Mike
Greenberg
