PUBLIQuartet: What Is American
Bright Shiny Things

With What Is American, PUBLIQuartet distances itself mightily from other string quartets, not so much for the particular thematic material grappled with but for the way in which it's tackled. For here is a group that plays more like an improvising jazz ensemble of string players than a formal classical string quartet; better yet, violinists Jannina Norpoth and Curtis Stewart, violist Nick Revel, and cellist Hamilton Berry sound wholly comfortable inhabiting that performative milieu. Moving beyond notation into improvisation is a daring move that involves a different skill-set, but the four show they're eminently up to the challenge.

One of the things at which PUBLIQuartet excels is re-imagining classical material by incorporating improv, and there's no better illustration of it than its treatment of Antonin Dvorák's “American” Quartet. Complementary to the “New World Symphony” composed just before it, his twelfth string quartet is given an improv-driven makeover that sounds unlike any performance the work has previously received. As in the symphony, an abundance of folk themes—by turns radiant, melancholy, and wistful—adds engaging personality to the material, but it's the assured playing and bluesy wail of the quartet that makes the piece memorable. Hearing the four tear into the “Vivace ma non troppo” with abandon is pure joy, and the music's roots in American Indigenous and Black music are clearly audible throughout.

It's the first of four works included on the release that are part of the group's ongoing improv-driven MIND | THE | GAP project, the others an inspired re-imagining of Fats Waller's “Honeysuckle Rose,” a live riff on Ornette Coleman's “Law Years” and “Street Woman” (from 1972's Science Fiction), and a four-part work called Wild Women that honours trailblazers Tina Turner, Betty Davis, Alice Coltrane, and Ida Cox. “Pavement Pounding Rose” sticks for adding narration by A'Lelia Bundles, the great-great-granddaughter of the pioneering Black entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker, to the quartet's jazzy swing. At album's end, “Black Coffee” (Turner) and “They Say I'm Different” (Davis) enliven Wild Women with funky swing and bluesy swagger, while “Er Ra” (Coltrane) takes a more contemplative route.

World premiere recordings of compositions by Vijay Iyer, Rhiannon Giddens, and Roscoe Mitchell also appear, the latter's PUBLIQuartet-commissioned CARDS 11-11-2020 interesting for deploying a collage approach in which cards containing musical excerpts are assembled in ways that connect to a free improv section. Inspired by an 1830s ad regarding the sale of a Black woman and her child, Giddens' At the Purchaser's Option stands out as a moving meditation on a horrible practice. Defiance emerges powerfully too in the text quietly chanted during the blues-drenched setting, “You can take my body / You can take my bones / You can take my blood / But not my soul.” At nine minutes, Iyer's 2012 Dig the Say advances through its oft-funky four-movement homage to the music of James Brown with dispatch.

Binding this adventurous set is the PUBLIQuartet-composed Fifth Verse, whose four brief parts are interspersed. In using the text of Oliver Wendell Holmes's U.S. Civil War-era fifth verse from “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the piece brings the thematic dimension of the project to the fore in granting the listener a chance to consider afresh its words in a bold new context. The complete verse is collectively read by numerous speakers in the opening “Prelude” and is then revisited in fragmented form thereafter, the gesture bringing attention to specific passages.

July 2022