Saved by a String Quartet (Actually, 17 of Them)
Ryan Truesdell’s homespun commissioning project, born of discomfort, led to a brand-new repertoire.
By March of 2021, the Covid pandemic had destroyed lives and livelihoods for a full year. Like many musicians, jazz composer and arranger Ryan Truesdell was frustrated by the not-much-to-do and the too-little-to-look- forward-to. How does one get going again in such an environment? Then he remembered what his hero, fellow big- band arranger Bill Holman, had once told him: “Whenever I get stuck writing, I go back to the Bartók string quartets.”
Truesdell, best known for his Gil Evans Project, which resurrected unrecorded Evans arrangements for his Grammy- nominated 2012 album Centennial, went back to Bartók. Revisiting those works inspired him to compose his own string quartet. That led to another thought: Maybe some of his colleagues in big-band jazz would like to do the same?
The result is Synthesis: The String Quartet Sessions—a three-CD, 40-track set of 17 compositions by 15 different composers, most of them notable jazz players or bandleaders with wide-ranging and often intertwined careers. Rufus Reid—who, as a bassist, anchored notable bands including Dexter Gordon’s late-1970s quartet—wrote a string quartet for Truesdell’s project in three movements that develops gradually, much like a progression from morning awakening
to mid-day agitation and evening contentment. A composition by Miho Hazama, who was born in Tokyo and now lives in New York City, and who won the 2011 ASCAP Young Jazz Composer Award, is full of surprises—unexpected sounds that are as witty as they are musical.
The darting melodies of “Murmuration and Adagio,” by Jim McNeely—a pianist for Stan Getz, Phil Woods, and the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, and a mentor to Hazama— were inspired by birds in flight. Alto saxophonist Christine Jensen, another McNeely protégé, composed “Tilting World” as a response to the pandemic, in which Sara Caswell’s bravura violin solo suggests hope.
The spirit of Bob Brookmeyer, who died in 2011 and was Truesdell’s teacher at the New England Conservatory of Music, loomed large, represented here by an unrecorded composition unearthed by Truesdell and a piece composed by Dave Rivello, who wrote a book about Brookmeyer. “Grey Cottage,” by John Hollenbeck, who has worked as a drummer with Brookmeyer and Fred Hersch, was composed during an artist residency in the Adirondacks; its brief, well-punctuated phrases suggest a search (through mountain mist, or life’s mysteries). “Violet Soul,” from Alan Ferber—a go-to trombonist for jazz artists including Hollenbeck and esperanza spalding as well as pop stars such as Paul Simon and Sufjan Stevens— arrives in the verse-chorus form of a popular song, in tribute to the composer’s wife, Jody Redhage Ferber.
Most of this new album is performed by a core quartet organized by Caswell that includes Redhage Ferber, violinist Joyce Hammann, and violist Lois Martin. The pandemic necessitated substitute string players for some sessions, and the composers’ instructions required a few supplementary players, including clarinetist Anat Cohen. Throughout, there is some improvisation, but many of these pieces are completely notated. Reid and Hazama, for example, didn’t include any improvised passages. Truesdell, by contrast, created windows for Cohen, Caswell, and Redhage Ferber to invent instrumental variations on nature sounds for his “Suite for Clarinet and String Quartet” and his theme, based on Brazilian choro music, for “Dança de Quarto.”
“We’re creating a third genre here,” Caswell says, though she’s reluctant to name it. And in fact, reviving the term “Third Stream” would be misleading, for there are elements of world music, cinematic scores, programmatic sounds, popular music, and post- modern meters and harmonies. Perhaps we should just call it Post- Pandemic Chamber Music.
I joined Truesdell, Caswell, Reid, and Hazama on Zoom six weeks before the album’s release for a conversation, from which the following is drawn.
Ryan Truesdell: Once I had the idea, I made a call to Sara, explaining what
I had in mind and asking, “Is this even possible?” She didn’t hang up, so that was a good sign. We talked for three hours.
Sara Caswell: It was a time when everyone was struggling to find ways to collaborate and create new material. So Ryan’s plan was a dream opportunity. I had no idea how and if it was going to happen. But when Ryan has a vision, he’s able to make it work.
Truesdell: I never considered composing all the music myself. I’m a Midwesterner; I was raised not to think about me, me, me all the time. I’m so fascinated by all my peers and contemporaries, that I wanted to hear what they could do. We started out with 12 composers, but I would say, “Oooh, what about so-and-so?” and it expanded from there. I had a little money saved up and I wanted to pay them a little to help them get through the pandemic, and to inspire them to write some new music.
This was March 2021. I started making a list of composers I wanted to invite, even if they didn’t have a lot of experience writing for string quartets. I wondered, “What would Rufus do with a string quartet? What would Miho do? What would John Hollenbeck do?” I was sure people would say no, but much to my surprise, most of them said yes. Everyone wrote back and said, “Oh, my god, I’ve always wanted to do that.”
Rufus Reid: I was completely blown away that he asked me to be part of this. I had written two orchestral pieces, but I had literally never written a string quartet. I’d always wanted to do one, and here was someone asking me to try. I had been told years ago that you can’t call yourself a composer until you do a string quartet. It’s not easy. There’s nowhere to hide, no drums are bashing away to cover up your mistakes. You really have to find the way to make it all happen with just the strings. On the other hand, strings have an incredible range in pitch and in the sounds they can create. It was scary, to be honest, but I embraced the challenge.
Miho Hazama: The fewer the musicians, the more challenging it is to write. A solo work is the hardest, but writing for four is a lot harder than writing for 13.
Truesdell: If you listen to all the music that the composers came up with, there’s a great variety. The big challenge was rhythm. It’s easy to write lush, beautiful sounds with strings, but to create the groove that we as jazz composers are known for with only four strings and no drum kit is hard. Each composer’s personality came through in these string quartets, just as it does in their big band work.
Reid: Ryan asked us to write a string quartet—not a jazz string quartet, just a string quartet. That opened the door to a football-field-sized area of possibilities. The first thing I did was to pull out all my string-quartet records and listen to them. I said, “Oh, my god, what have I gotten myself into?” It’s 300-400 years of music that still sounds great today. I wasn’t sure we could do it, but I knew it would be powerful if we did.
Truesdell: When I was studying with Bob Brookmeyer, he talked about the dangers of having too much freedom as a writer. He often described the module that you work within. But when I invited composers for this project, I didn’t put any limits on style or length. The only thing I asked was that they write for these four instruments. I decided there’s so much history behind the string quartet format that that was already a heavy ask. If I had said, “Write a swinging string quartet” or “Write a five-minute quartet,” it might have started to feel like work.
Reid: The key was getting the right musicians. You can get four really good string players and have them play a whole note, and it won’t sound like a whole note by these four players. To sit and listen to these four musicians play, it was a different sound from other quartets. I got a sense of that blended- strings thing I’d never heard close-up before.
Caswell: I knew we needed a collection of string players who could bring a wide range of experience to the project. We needed knowledge of string-quartet history and tradition. But we also needed pop, rock, and jazz experience to bring the rhythms to the fore.
Truesdell: I didn’t set out to make a jazz record. But it was people with a back- ground in jazz, so it’s jazz-ish. Miho and Rufus brought a lot of classical to it. Joseph Borsellino recorded this bass-and- drum track for the quartet to play to.
In a big-band situation, it’s more of a dictator situation. We stand up in front and say, “Do this” or “Don’t do that.” I was surprised by the collaborative nature of this process. Rufus and Miho were asking questions, like, “How can I get the sound I’m looking for?” And the string players were saying, “Let’s try it like this; this might work.” At the first rehearsal, you think, “We’re never going to get this together.” By the time we recorded, though, it would sound great. No piece remained the same from the first rehearsal to the recording.
Caswell: To be in that kind of intensive situation was exciting. We would block out a week of time for each piece. We’d rehearse for three days, six hours a day, then we’d go into the studio and record. Each day, we would get in there and dissect what was going on in the piece, what was the composer’s vision—usually with the composer present. That meta- morphosis from rehearsal to recording was something I’d never experienced before—it was a life-changing experience.
Truesdell: Where is that spark of inspiration that gets you to write music? When I was with Maria Schneider, she’d talk about things that inspired her, like a Nijinsky photograph or the sound of a bird. But you start there and that leads you some- where else. A lot of the composers were longing to be outside again during the lockdown. McNeely’s piece “Murmuration and Adagio” was inspired by the way a flock of starlings will form a giant cloud that flows this way and that. Asuka Kakitani wrote about a polar bear that she said reflected her family. One reason we became composers and musicians is we’re not so great at expressing ourselves in conversation.
Hazama: A lot of the pieces I wrote during the pandemic were coming from the stories I made up, stories about the happy days I would be having if not for Covid. Something as simple as going out for a picnic would have been such a great treat in those days. So I imagined a day like that by asking myself, “What are the chipmunks in Central Park doing now that people aren’t having picnics?” That became my composition, “Chipmunk Timmy’s Funny Sunny Day.”
Reid: Just as Miho evoked the sound of chipmunks, I used the sound of cicadas in my piece. Astor Piazzolla used such sounds; a lot of technique goes into producing those sounds. But you can’t let the sounds take over, just like you can’t play ballads all night or play everything in the same key.
Caswell: Having Miho, Rufus, and all the composers around to talk to was a treat. We’ve often wished we could sit down with Duke Ellington or Béla Bartók and ask them questions about their pieces, so to do it with these composers was special. When Miho talked about being outside and having fun with other people, that brought a whole different level of levity and fun to the piece. That’s my job—to take the notes on the page and make them come alive.
Truesdell: I thought we would write this music and maybe have a concert where we played the material, and it would end there. But when we started getting the music in, it was so great. I said, “Oh, no, we’re going to have to make a record.” I was tasked with releasing this huge project in an era where many listeners expect the music to grab them in 50 seconds. I wondered how I should release this into the world. Some people said, “Oh, you should release it in volumes.” But that would feel like I was picking favorites. So I decided to release it as one collection, because it functions as a giant whole, as a new collection of material for string players. My hope is that jazz string quartets will want to play these pieces, that promoters will want to program Rufus’s piece alongside Bartók and Beethoven.
Photo credits: Agnete Schlictkrull (Hazama), John Abbott (Reid), Shervin Lainez (Caswell), Mercedes Jelinek (Hollenbeck), Nilaya Sabnis (Lady Jess), Shervin Lainez (Cohen, Truesdell), Jaime Kahn (Kakitani), Stefe Jiroflée (Anderson), Pia Johnson (Perica),
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