Turtle Island Players Improvise With Strings

A string quartet is not exactly the first musical collective that comes to mind as a vehicle for jazz expression. No rhythm section, no horns, four stringed instruments--it clearly seems to be an instrumentation far better suited for its role as the prime chamber music ensemble.

At least that was the case until the Turtle Island String Quartet came along in the mid-’80s. The Kronos Quartet already had advanced the notion that a string ensemble could handle works from the jazz and pop areas of the musical spectrum. And the Turtle Island players took matters one step further, and substantially closer to the jazz arena, by adding the critical element of improvisation.

On Saturday night at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium, the group--which now includes original members David Balakrishnan on violin and Mark Summer on cello, with violist Danny Seidenberg and violinist Evan Price--made a convincing case for the effectiveness of the string quartet within the jazz idiom.

A good part of that success traced to the rhythmic devices used by the ensemble, and, most notably, by Summer. Striking the strings with their bows to produce scratchy-sounding rhythmic accents, tossing melodic articulation back and forth from instrument to instrument and, in Summer’s case, laying down walking bass lines interspersed with taps on the wood of his instrument, the quartet managed to generate infectious grooves.

This sort of underpinning made a solid foundation for improvising. Here, however, the results were a bit more uneven. Balakrishnan sounded rhythmically disconnected, especially while improvising in the early part of the set, and Price generally performed better with written rather than spontaneous lines.

But Seidenberg’s dark tone and blues-based phrasing was impressive, and Summer’s work was consistently spirited, imaginative and highly rhythmic.

String quartet scoring by jazz writers often emerges in block harmony, saxophone-section style.

But these classically trained players offered a series of works--including arrangements of jazz standards such as Horace Silver’s “Ecaroh” and a particularly imaginative rendering of Bronislau Kaper’s “Green Dolphin Street”--that explored the full range of contrapuntal quartet writing while still maintaining the forward surge of jazz.