POP MUSIC REVIEW : Greene String Quartet: More Than Punch and Pizazz

If you had to come up with just one word to describe the Greene String Quartet, classy would do the job nicely.

Headed by violinist Richard Greene, this improvising foursome--which performed Friday in the intimate and friendly surroundings of the Shade Tree Stringed Instruments--isn’t a jump-up-and-down act like the better-known Turtle Island String Quartet.

Rather, the Greene band, which has been around about 10 years, wins listeners with a broad presentation that is underscored by jazz and combines ample portions of punch and pizazz with subtlety, invention and lyricism, offering material that is often sublime in its musicality.

Greene is one of popular music’s most acclaimed violinists, having played with late-’60s country-rock band Seatrain, bluegrass king Bill Monroe, Henry Mancini, Jerry Garcia and countless others. His able associates--whose collective resumes list such notables as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the American Jazz Symphony and the Band--are Margaret Wooten (violin) Jimbo Ross (viola) and Dane Little (cello).

At the Shade Tree, amid a collection of guitars, mandolins and dulcimers, the Greene quartet played selections crafted expressly for the band. Most of the material was drawn from its two Virgin Records CDs--the newest, “Bluegreene,” is due out next month.

The pieces ranged from intense and gutsy (Ed Kusby’s “I’m Blue: Tribute to Billie Holiday”) to poignant (“Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”) to richly melodic (pianist Dick Hyman’s “Fantasy on Londonderry Air”). And they were given just-so treatments, the quartet working with panache and precision, so that the music breathed with life.

Kusby’s “Tribute” shifted in tempos from haggard and slow to vibrantly fast, giving a haunting and melancholy musical portrait of this tragic artist at the end of her brief life. Greene and Ross both had opportunities to deliver poignant, flavorful lines to a tiny yet enthralled house of 35.

“Pork Pie” was also a piece that revealed deep emotion, with Greene tackling Charles Mingus’ paean to Lester Young, issuing some statements that seemed to make his strings cry, while others were a funky shout. At two points, Wooten and Ross sang lyrics to the number penned by Joni Mitchell, and the group closed the piece with lines voiced like a train whistle calling far away in the night.

Hyman’s “Londonderry” began with a pastoral quality, evoking an image of the British Isles as a melody played by Greene floated gently over more rhythmically active lines from the others. The number moved into a jaunty middle section, then closed with a harmonized version of its centerpiece, the lulling “Danny Boy.”

More dynamically energetic was Chick Corea’s “Children’s Song #6,” which started with a childlike flavor but evolved to passages that had stomp. “Blue Set for Jazz String Quartet,” written by Peter Schickele (otherwise known as the madcap performer PDQ Bach), opened with a section called “Mumbo Jumbo” where you could have sworn blues great Junior Wells was right there, singing and swinging with the powerful blues groove the band created.

Though Greene and Ross were the group’s featured soloists, improvising deftly within the frameworks, Little also soloed with poise, though from written parts. Also, many of the pieces had written jazz passages the group performed as an ensemble, the four lines moving as one, demonstrating how well these musicians work with one another.

Greene wants to attract wider attention to his band, and the new album, with accompanying performances, should do that. It is a vital ensemble that deserves to be heard.