Turtle Island String Quartet, A Love Supreme: The Legacy of John Coltrane
Classical quartet unlocks the hidden structure of a jazz great.
The longtime Turtle Island String Quartet has made a subtle but important change with this album — they dropped the word “String” from their name. Like Kronos Quartet, the Turtle Islanders see themselves not as a “string quartet” in the tradition of the Guarneri or Juilliard Quartets, but as a 4-piece band whose members happen to play violins, viola, cello and octave violin — along with percussive effects they developed over a 20-year period that give this band its distinctive swinging sound.
The Turtle Island Quartet made an immediate splash in the late '80s with an arrangement of the jazz standard “A Night in Tunisia,” and has always included works by jazz greats like John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Oliver Nelson and Miles Davis in their repertoire. This album combines the quartet's extraordinary arranging skills with their love of improvisation as well as something else: a sense that John Coltrane's music is somehow classical. Without giving up the all-important element of improvising, the Turtle Island Quartet takes a number of Coltrane's most important works — as well as works by other composers and musicians that Coltrane made his own — and treats them as a received tradition, like Mozart, or Bartók.
The centerpiece of the album is a stunning arrangement of Coltrane's four-part suite, “A Love Supreme.” Listen to Coltrane's own recordings (studio and live), and you'll reach the obvious conclusion: there is no way this could work with a string quartet, however hard they swing. But using a cunning mix of fully-notated parts and freewheeling lines — and no, you won't be able to tell which is which — this quartet pulls it off. It swings, and it makes clear the formal structure that suggests we have all underestimated Coltrane as a composer.
Of course, there's “Naima,” which the quartet has played for many years and plays as convincingly as they do their own compositions. But all the great arrangements would mean little if the foursome didn't back it up with some seriously good playing. Just listen to the violin solo on “Countdown” to see just how well this music fits on the “classical” strings.
