With Taylor’s Help, the Juilliard Gets Jazzy

Fate? Happenstance? Call it what you will, but the vagaries of an airline’s seating assignments led to a collaboration between the famed Juilliard String Quartet and jazz legend Billy Taylor.

“(Juilliard cellist) Joel Krosnick chanced to sit next to Billy on a plane and the idea for this piece came up,” said quartet violist Samuel Rhodes. “In later discussions, we all thought it was intriguing to have a piece by a musician who was a (jazz) master and amazingly literate in other idioms as well.

“We’ve commissioned so many classical works in the past that in this instance we wanted to do something different,” said Rhodes from his hotel in Monte Carlo, where the group was touring last week.

The result is “Homage” (for String Quartet and Jazz Trio), a three-movement piece integrating jazz and classical formats, which will receive its West Coast premiere in the Los Angeles area this week. It features the quartet--Krosnick, Rhodes and violinists Robert Mann and Joel Smirnoff--and Taylor’s trio, including the composer/pianist, bassist Victor Gaskin and drummer Bobby Thomas.

The work--debuted in Madison, Wis., in March, 1990, and performed only occasionally since then--will be performed Tuesday at Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa and Wednesday at Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena. (The Juilliard will also perform Beethoven’s Quartet in F Minor, Op. 95.)

Taylor, 69, was on familiar turf. He holds a bachelor of music degree and a Ph.D in music education, and among his previous meldings of classical and jazz realms is “Suite for Jazz Piano and Orchestra,” commissioned in 1973 for the Utah Symphony by its then-conductor, Maurice Abravanel.

Still, it took him a while to find the right tone for the 45-minute work, which is dedicated to four great jazz string players--violinists Stuff Smith and Eddie South and bassists Oscar Pettiford and Slam Stewart--all of whom the composer worked with early in his career.

“I started off in a more contemporary classical direction, with some of those textures, but with jazz feeling,” Taylor said from his home in New York City recently.

“But then I went to a (Juilliard) performance and heard the members play the Ravel Quartet and I hadn’t thought of using that piece as a point of reference,” he said. “The (sound) reminded me so much of what what I wanted to hear in a jazz work that I tore up what I had written and went on and wrote ‘Homage.’ ”

The themes of the three movements draw on the musical styles of Smith, South, Pettiford and Stewart, as Taylor remembers them.

Since it is a jazz composition, “Homage” includes improvisation from all the musicians on stage. Smirnoff is the only Juilliard member who’s had any experience at jazz soloing, so Taylor wrote out solos for the other players. But he insisted that those sketches serve as springboards to personal statements from the players.

“I told each guy, ‘You take the basic solo, look at at, and as you hear other things that work, you make changes,’ ” Taylor said. “That way it becomes something that is really (them) instead of me.”

“It’s an evolving work. As we play it, it changes,” Taylor said. “What you hear now will be much different than what we played a year ago.”