Harlem Quartet showcases musical diversity in latest CD

New York, NY (July 10, 2020)

New CD from the boundary-busting Harlem Quartet features music of Debussy, Bolcom, Gillespie, and López-Gavilán

Harlem Quartet is known for the unique eclecticism of its repertoire, and the ensemble’s newest recording affirms that legacy. Cross Pollination, a self-produced CD to be released on July 17, features music from the European canon (Debussy’s String Quartet in G Minor, Op. 10); classic American jazz (Dizzy Gillespie’s A Night in Tunisia, as arranged by Dave Glenn and Harlem Quartet); a take on Ragtime by a contemporary European-American composer (William Bolcom’s Three Rags for String Quartet); and Cuarteto en guagancó, an African dance-inspired work by another eminent living composer, Cuba’s Guido Lopéz-Gavilán (father of Havana-born Ilmar Gavilán, Harlem Quartet’s first violinist).

Cross Pollination is a sampling of works currently in the tour repertoire of Harlem Quartet—whose members, in addition to Ilmar Gavilán, include Melissa White, violin; Jaime Amador, viola; and Felix Umansky, cello. As the quartet states in its liner notes, the album was “conceived to illustrate the cross-pollination of musical ideas between the European classical tradition and world music.” Debussy’s quartet was influenced by the sounds of Indonesian gamelan that he heard in Paris, and “his impressionistic style went on to have a profound influence on an emerging American genre, known today as jazz.” Gillespie, a pioneer of the modern jazz movement, “utilized harmonic elements traceable directly to Debussy.” The uniquely African-American style known as Ragtime was embraced by Bolcom, who “honored the genre with a great sense of humor” in Three Rags for String Quartet. And “parallel to the birth of early jazz in New Orleans with the Ragtime influence, early Cuban music also gestated from the confluence of European and African roots. Like Debussy, Guido Lopéz-Gavilán’s Guagancó takes non-western musical ideas and uniquely transfers them to western instruments.

 

“Their diversity from classical to jazz, their amazing intuitive playing, their enthusiasm and professionalism, their poise and interpretation of challenging music from Debussy, Dizzy Gillespie and Schubert, made one feel that music can transpose all issues.” 

— Juliet Jones, Herald Review (Grand Rapids, MN)

About the Harlem Quartet:

New York-based Harlem Quartet, which recently completed a three-year residency at London’s Royal College of Music, has been praised for its "panache" by The New York Times and hailed in the Cincinnati Enquirer for “bringing a new attitude to classical music, one that is fresh, bracing and intelligent.” It has also won plaudits from such veteran musicians as GRAMMY-winning woodwind virtuoso Ted Nash of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, who declared in a May 2018 Playbill article, “Harlem Quartet is one of the greatest string quartets I have ever heard. They can play anything.” Since its public debut at Carnegie Hall in 2006, the ensemble has thrilled audiences and students in 47 states as well as in the U.K., France, Belgium, Brazil, Panama, Canada, Venezuela, Japan, Ethiopia, and South Africa.

Harlem Quartet has three distinctive characteristics: diverse programming that combines music from the standard string quartet canon with jazz, Latin, and contemporary works; a collaborative approach to performance that is continually broadening the ensemble’s repertoire and audience reach through artistic partnerships with other musicians from the classical and jazz worlds; and an ongoing commitment to residency activity and other forms of educational outreach.

The quartet’s mission is to advance diversity in classical music, engaging young and new audiences through the discovery and presentation of varied repertoire that includes works by composers of color. Passion for this work has made the quartet a leading ensemble in both educational and community engagement activities. In this capacity, the quartet has written several successful grants, including a Cultural Connections Artist-In-Residence grant from James Madison University and a 2016 Guarneri String Quartet grant from Chamber Music America; the latter allowed the quartet to participate in an extended performance and educational residency in Mobile, Alabama, which included a close partnership with the Mobile Symphony Orchestra. In the 2017-18 season Harlem Quartet undertook a week of residency activities with the Santa Fe Youth Symphony. And since 2015 it has led an annual workshop at Music Mountain in Falls Village, Connecticut, culminating in a concert at that venue.

In addition to performing a varied menu of string quartet literature across the country and around the world, Harlem Quartet has collaborated with such distinguished artists as classical pianists Michael Brown, Awadagin Pratt, Misha Dichter, and Fei-Fei; jazz pianists Chick Corea and Aldo López-Gavilán; violist Ida Kavafian; cellist Carter Brey; clarinetists Paquito D’Rivera, Eddie Daniels, Anthony McGill, and David Shifrin; saxophonist Tim Garland; jazz legends Ted Nash, Gary Burton, Stanley Clarke, and John Patitucci; the Shanghai Quartet; and Imani Winds.

Harlem Quartet’s 2019-20 engagements included a weeklong Quad City Arts Residency (Rock Island, IL); debuts with Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Dizzy’s Club, Chamber Music Tulsa, Stanford Live, and Duke University; and return engagements with the Chamber Music Society of Detroit, the Phillips Collection (Washington, DC), Asheville Chamber Music Series, and Calgary Pro Musica. Scheduled for 2020-21 are concerts with bassist John Patitucci at Wheaton College (Wheaton, IL) and Chamber Music Concerts (Ashland, OR); an engagement at Newberry Opera House (Newberry, SC); and a joint appearance with the Catalyst Quartet at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, sponsored by the Chamber Music Society of Philadelphia. 

Alongside its regular activities as a chamber ensemble, Harlem Quartet performs a variety of works written for solo string quartet and orchestra. In 2012, with the Chicago Sinfonietta under Music Director Mei-Ann Chen, the quartet gave the world premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story as arranged for string quartet and orchestra by Randall Craig Fleischer. It reprised its performance of that score with the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra under Fleischer’s direction, and again with the Santa Fe Concert Association. Chicago Sinfonietta and the quartet recorded the West Side Story arrangement, along with works for string quartet and orchestra by Michael Abels and Benjamin Lees, for the Cedille Records release Delights and Dances.

Harlem Quartet has been featured on WNBC, CNN, NBC’s Today Show, WQXR-FM, and the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and it performed in 2009 for President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House. The quartet made its European debut in October 2009 performing at the residence of the U.S. ambassador to the U.K., and returned to Europe as guest artists and faculty members of the Musica Mundi International Festival in Belgium. In early 2011 the ensemble was featured at the Panama Jazz Festival in Panama City.

The quartet’s recording career began in 2007 when White Pine Music issued Take the "A" Train, a release featuring the string quartet version of that jazz standard by Billy Strayhorn; the CD was highlighted that year in the November issue of Strings magazine. A second CD, featuring three string quartets by Walter Piston, was released in 2010 by Naxos. The quartet’s third recording, released in 2011, is a collaboration with pianist Awadagin Pratt and showcases works by American composer Judith Lang Zaimont. More recently the quartet collaborated with jazz pianist Chick Corea in a Grammy-winning Hot House album that included Corea’s "Mozart Goes Dancing," which won a separate Grammy as Best Instrumental Composition. The jazz album Heart of Brazil: A Tribute to Egberto Gismonti, recorded with the Eddie Daniels Quartet, was released in June 2018 on Resonance Records. Harlem Quartet’s latest album, the July 2020 release Cross Pollination, features works by Debussy, William Bolcom, Dizzy Gillespie, and Guido López-Gavilán.  

Harlem Quartet was founded in 2006 by The Sphinx Organization, a national nonprofit dedicated to building diversity in classical music and providing access to music education in underserved communities. In 2013 the quartet completed its third and final year in the Professional String Quartet Training Program at New England Conservatory, under the tutelage of Paul Katz, Donald Weilerstein, Kim Kashkashian, Miriam Fried, and Martha Katz.

The quartet is represented worldwide by Sciolino Artist Management, www.samnyc.us.

July 2020

Press Contact:  Hattie Simon

207-485-2227

hattie@samnyc.us 

CD Photo by Herminio Rodriguez