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REVIEW: Turtle Island, Harris offer spiritual performance

By John Kenyon

It is a stated goal of the Turtle Island Quartet to revive the improvisational nature of chamber music, and the group’s performance Saturday night at Hancher Auditorium with jazz vibraphonist Stefon Harris showed the four musicians are well along the way toward achieving it.

The performance, ostensibly a tribute to the sacred music of legendary composer Duke Ellington billed as “The Divine Duke,” was as much a display of the way masterful artists can bring all of their talents to bear on the performance of music; not necessarily jazz or classical or anything in between, but simply music.

The California group opened the show with two songs on its own, starting with Leonard Bernstein’s “Cool” from “West Side Story,” followed by “Wapango,” a tune from a collaboration between the quartet and clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera, who wrote it. These nicely set the tone for the evening, not only by quickly showing the four players’ chops, but by highlighting the way they each intended to use the entirety of their instruments in pursuit of the right sounds.

On “Cool,” violinist Mads Tolling kept the beat by rubbing the bow across the strings without playing a note, the first of many displays of instrumental dexterity that allowed the quartet to approximate the rhythm section of a swinging jazz band. On “Wapango,” cellist Mark Summer played, plucked, tapped and slapped his cello, using every inch of the instrument to approximate the drum and bass of a jazz combo (when making introductions late in the show, Summer cheekily credited himself with “cello, bass and drums”). Each player’s toes tapped animatedly to the beat in each tune. It was strange to hear a string quartet swing and stranger still to see this kind of body language from one, and it was clear already that this would not be an ordinary chamber music concert.

Harris came out at this point and remained for the rest of the concert. The five began together with Ellington’s “Thanks for the Beautiful Land on the Delta,” the first of three songs from the composer’s 1970 album New Orleans Suite to be performed. All three also appear on Harris’ latest CD, African Tarantella, Dances with Duke. It was a beautiful rendition, and it showed from the outset that it would be hard to not fixate on the energetic Harris, musically and visually, despite the quartet’s virtuosity.

Dave Brubeck’s beloved tribute to Ellington, “The Duke,” followed. The sweetly swinging, stripped-down number was playful, and offered a nice lead-in to the highlight of the first set. That was “Epilogue,” Harris’ tribute to the late vibraphonist Milt Jackson, written the day Jackson died. It closes Harris’ ambitious suite, The Grand Unification Theory. He started with a mournful, spiritual run on the vibes. The strings came in with a funereal figure that lifted Harris’ melody, helping to transform it, slowly, into something celebratory and hopeful. He struck out on his own then with a lightning-quick solo on the vibes, exorcising sorrow to reveal a sort of furious grace that was smoothed out by the strings' return. It was a gorgeous piece, and clearly the best song of the first set despite being the first time the five musicians had performed it together.

That set closed with the first movement of “Infusion,” a piece written by the quartet. Perhaps it was Summer’s tongue-in-cheek introduction in which he talked about how the members of string quartets are rumored to not get along and ride in their own separate buses, but the song has a swinging, slightly sinister feel.

The second half of the show opened with “Moment’s Notice” by John Coltrane, the lead track from the quartet’s Grammy-nominated album A Love Supreme, which features the group’s versions of several of the saxophone giant’s compositions. It was a very faithful rendition that truly swung, but the presence of Harris’ vibes to push the melody makes the recorded version without him feel a bit flat by comparison.

Two more tunes from Ellington’s New Orleans Suite followed. “Bourbon Street Jingling Jollies” was a languid, lyrical mood-setter, while “Portrait of Wellman Braud” proved to be the night’s stand-out performance. Introducing the song, Harris said, “Let’s throw them a curve. Let’s just make something up at the beginning.” They did, five people playing different improvised parts that all came together wonderfully to create a slightly contrapuntal introduction for what evolved into a slinky groove. Harris stayed on marimba for much of the song before moving to the vibes for a solo. During this, the violin and cello were being plucked to vamp behind him. Both Summer and viola player Jeremy Kittel offered great solos of their own.

The second set closed with a joyful, run through Chick Corea’s “Senor Mouse,” taken from the pianist’s duet album with vibraphonist Gary Burton, Crystal Silence. The five musicians returned for a one-song encore of Oliver Nelson’s standard, “Stolen Moments” that closed the show.

While the entire concert could be called spiritual and the presence of songs by and about Ellington fit the stated theme, the “Divine Duke” aspect of the show was driven home at with the second-to-last performance of the main set, a combination of three songs from Ellington’s mid-1960s Sacred Concerts: “Praise God,” “Come Sunday” and “Freedom.”

Introducing this mini-suite, Summer talked about the risky nature of Ellington melding spiritual music with jazz. It was an exercise in not just breaking boundaries in music, but in showing there really were none to begin with, he said. It was a fitting description of the music of the Turtle Island Quartet and Stefon Harris, artists who fearlessly genre hop in pursuit of excellence. The result on this night was indeed spiritual.