A Diverse TISQ With Cuban Flavor

The Turtle Island String Quartet, since its inception in the late ‘80s, has taken the view that the best way to approach music is to forget about genres and boundaries. As a result, the quartet has generated a startlingly eclectic array of music, stretching easily from jazz, Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa to R&B;, world music and bluegrass--with numerous stops in between.

On Saturday night at El Camino College’s Marsee Auditorium, the quartet got together with clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera for a program that added a heady seasoning of Cuban elements to a typically diverse program of music.

The centerpiece of the concert was El Jicotea, a newly commissioned work composed by D’Rivera for the TISQ. Well-crafted (Rivera is classically trained), the piece simmered with bits and pieces of Latin rhythms as the brief, but attractive, principal theme arched through flowing contrapuntal passages. As a showcase work, it will serve the TISQ well in future appearances.

The most appealing segments of the program, however, were those in which D’Rivera performed with the quartet. The combination of clarinet and string quartet--usually referred to as a Clarinet Quintet--has resulted in some of the finest music in the classical canon, notably the Quintets by Mozart and Brahms.

D’Rivera and the TISQ found other pleasures in the instrumentation, however, especially in the dramatically contrasting “Zombie Woof” (by Zappa), “Maracatu” (by Brazilian composer Egberto Gismonti and “A Night in Tunisia” (by Dizzy Gillespie). In addition to other attributes, the members of TISQ are all improvising musicians, and the opportunity to stretch out with D’Rivera in spontaneous fashion--especially on “A Night In Tunisia”--produced some impressive results.

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D’Rivera, clearly enjoying the musical setting, added some fun with the audience during his solo, quoting the opening phrase of Gillespie’s “Salt Peanuts,” urging the crowd to respond with the familiar verbal phrase--which they did. The individual members of TISQ--founder David Balakrishnan, violin, and Mark Summer, cello, as well as violist Danny Seidenberg and newest member Evan Price, viola, affirmed, as they have for years, that in their hands the string quartet, individually and collectively, can function in musically creative fashion in any style with any guest artist.