JAZZ REVIEW : New York String Trio Carves a Niche in Contemporary Music Performance

Add the New York String Trio to the list of chamber ensembles who are carving out a broadly-eclectic new area of contemporary musical performance. In an appearance at Pasadena’s stately old Castle Green Friday night, the violin-guitar-bass ensemble, like such West Coast-based groups as the Kronos Quartet, the Turtle Island Quartet and the Greene Quartet, underscored the burgeoning potential of acoustic improvisational music.

With the exception of brief forays through Leonard Bernstein’s “New York, New York,” John Lewis’ “Skating in Central Park” and Charles Mingus’ “Nostalgia in Times Square,” the Trio performed their own original compositions. Guitarist James Emery provided the lion’s share of the program with works filled with stylish dissonances and fragmentary references to everyone from Alban Berg to Phillip Glass. The better pieces--especially “Ephemera Trilogy” and “Shadows in the Light”--managed to grow past the influences into intriguing lives of their own.

Bassist John Lindberg contributed an attractive work called “Anticipations,” and violinist Charles Burnham added his New Age-ish “Low Fat Lullaby.”

Despite the determined originality of the program, however, many of the Trio’s pieces tended to fall into similar structural patterns, and the improvisations were long on style and short on substance.

Emery’s solos generally consisted of virtuosic flurries of notes that were more impressive for their technical excellence than for their emotional depth. Lindberg seemed to have a somewhat broader dramatic range, but Burnham was frequently plagued by questionable intonation and an unappealing, almost vibrato-less tone.

Still, it was a program that faltered only because it aimed for such a high level of musical achievement. The New York String Trio obviously is a group with tremendous potential. A little more work on content and feeling, however, will be vital to its future.