At 25, Turtle Island Quartet turns back to Hendrix

Jesse Hamlin, Special to The Chronicle

Friday, December 3, 2010

In 1981, violinist David Balakrishnan began composing string quartet music that seamlessly merged the styles he loved: jazz, classical, bluegrass and Indian music. But who could play it?

“I was writing for a string quartet that just didn’t exist,” says Balakrishnan, a UCLA-trained composer who grew up listening to Indian music, played with Stephane Grappelli and David Grisman, and was deep into Beethoven’s middle-period quartets. He taped the first version of his groundbreaking composition “Balopadem” by overdubbing all the parts himself. In 1985, Balakrishnan co-founded the group that could deliver the grooving, multilingual music he envisioned: Turtle Island String Quartet.

In the vanguard
Over the past quarter century, the renowned Bay Area quartet has been in the vanguard of boundary-blurring string musicians – along with bassist Edgar Meyer and fiddler Mark O’Connor – who can play Mozart, Monk and Bill Monroe with equal skill and passion. Turtle Island, which celebrates its silver anniversary this weekend with a pair of San Francisco Performances-produced shows at Herbst Theatre, took the traditional string quartet in a swinging new direction, creating a sonic world where a Brahmsian passage may flow into a bop solo or a patch of James Brown funk.

“I wanted to take the string quartet form, the genius of it, into the world that I lived in,” says Balakrishnan, 56, a big, robust man who made music his life after hearing Jimi Hendrix live at the Los Angeles Forum in 1968. That electrifying experience inspired him to “get off the page” and begin improvising Hendrix licks on the violin.

Forty years later, Balakrishnan wrote a suite of string quartet arrangements of songs from Hendrix’s timeless 1968 “Electric Ladyland” album. It’s featured on Turtle Island’s latest CD, “Have You Ever Been …?,” along with Balakrishnan’s “Tree of Life,” a beautiful four-movement work that organically melds elements of Indian and Afro-Cuban music, hoedown fiddling, blues and other genres.

Grammy winners
The Turtles, who scored a Grammy in 2006 for “4 + 4,” a collaboration with the Ying Quartet, and another in 2008 for their John Coltrane CD, will play music from the new record and more on Friday night. They’ll be joined by the virtuoso mandolinist Mike Marshall, a charter member of the creative San Francisco string scene from which Turtle Island emerged, and the soulful jazz pianist Cyrus Chestnut, another favorite colleague (their other collaborators include the guitar-playing Assad Brothers and the Cuban jazz clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera).

“For me, the album is the culmination of the past 25 years,” says Balakrishnan. “It’s going back to the first light that went on for me – Hendrix – and tells the Turtle Island story.”

He’s sitting in the horse-country Novato home of Turtle Island cellist Mark Summer, the other original member of the quartet that features two brilliant young musicians: violinist Mads Tolling and violist Jeremy Kittel.
Summer’s extraordinary ability to play like a full jazz rhythm section – with walking bass lines, slapped percussive patterns, plucked off-beats and strummed chords – is at the core of the Turtle Island sound. (His marvelous solo arrangement and playing of Hendrix’s “Little Wing” summons the sound of the rock icon’s electric guitar, voice, drummer and bass player).

A classical start
Groomed from early age for a classical career, Summer, who likes to say “I’m in recovery from classical music,” quit the Winnipeg Symphony and spent a year improvising on the cello. He began playing pop and jazz gigs and fell under the sway of the innovative bluegrass fiddler Darol Anger, who was living in the Bay Area and playing with Balakrishnan in a group called Jazz Violin Celebration.

Summer, who’d met Anger at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, moved out here in 1985 to join the scene. Shortly after arriving, he found himself on stage at the Great American Music Hall, jamming with Anger, Balakrishnan and violist Laurie Moore. They played a Bach chorale note-for-note, then dug into the jazz standard “All of Me.” The crowd loved it. A few months later, the foursome became the Turtle Island String Quartet. The group took its name from poet Gary Snyder’s 1974 book “Turtle Island,” titled after the American Indian tern for the North American continent.

When Balakrishnan first proposed the idea of an improvising string quartet that would use classical forms to play jazz and his multi-stylistic music, “I thought it was pretty outrageous,” says Summer, 52. “It was tough to see. How was this going to be received? It was received really well.”

Back in 1985, there weren’t a lot of string players around who could play jazz and classical chamber music equally well. San Francisco’s pioneering Kronos Quartet had recorded the music of Thelonious Monk, and would also celebrate the music of Bill Evans, but the string parts weren’t improvised.

Blurring the lines
“The idea of a string quartet playing jazz was in the air, but nobody had imagined Turtle Island, where the players were jazz and classical musicians,” Balakrishnan says. Everyone in the group improvises, composes and arranges. “I wanted to blur the lines between improvisation and composition. Mark and I always talk about how, as we’ve grown over the years, there’s this amazing conflict built into the group between the controlled composition and the freedom of the individual.”

Tolling, who joined the Turtles seven years ago, thrives on that balance, the challenge of creating spontaneous melodies and playing with the precision and tonal beauty that classical music requires. He also had to learn the bluegrass fiddling techniques, like the chop and shuffle bow, to bring Turtle Island’s music to life.

“It’s enriched me tremendously,” says Tolling, who takes a similar multi-stylistic approach with his own group. “You have to deliver on so many levels. The group exists in a world of its own design. It’s a string quartet that swings and integrates all these styles. It’s not a gimmick. It’s how David hears the music.”
Balakrishnan decided to delve back into Hendrix’s music while visiting the Woodstock Museum in Bethel Woods, N.Y., a few years ago. Watching a video of Hendrix’s Woodstock performance, he was overwhelmed by the music of “an American genius.”

Rather than focusing on the “superficial aspects of the music, the energy and the vibrato, we wanted to show him as a great composer, not just a hot guitarist,” Balakrishnan says. “Sometimes you want to take a piece and really reinvent it. But this is music that I loved as a kid, and it was holy ground to me. I didn’t want to undo it, I wanted to just be it. Hendrix was layering lines on top of each other, overdubbing them into a soundscape. It was perfect for a string quartet.”

Expanding range
Balakrishnan and Summer credit the musicians who’ve come through Turtle Island over the years, among them such prominent players as violist Irene Sazer and violinist Tracy Silverman, with putting their mark on the music and expanding its range.

“I feel the group is more flexible and personal than when we started,” Summer says. “David had this great vision, and the individual players have helped him see how far these roads can lead,” Summer says. Turtle Island, he adds, “was way ahead of its time.”

Kittel, a 26-year-old classically trained fiddler who joined the group three years ago, agrees. Listening to Turtle Island opened his ears.

“They were very influential in paving the way, opening the doors for string players to see other possibilities,” Kittel says.

Balakrishnan saw those possibilities 25 years ago, even if had no idea how they’d play out.

Natural evolution
“It’s been a natural evolution,” says the violinist, who says with all due modesty that Turtle Island has helped redefine the parameters of classical music. “I don’t like the term cutting-edge, which makes me think of music that’s hard to understand and listen to. To me, this is like a flower that bloomed.” {sbox}
Turtle Island Quartet: With mandolinist Mike Marshall and pianist Cyrus Chestnut. 8 p.m. Fri. Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness Ave., S.F. $30-$50. Family matinee. 11 a.m. Sat. at Herbst. $10 kids, $15 adults. (415) 392-2545. www.sfperformances.org.

E-mail freelancer Jesse Hamlin at pinkletters@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page Q – 21 of the San Francisco Chronicle