Quartet San Francisco
QSF Plays Brubeck
Grammy Award–nominated string quartet QSF has forged a singular synthesis of Dave Brubeck’s West Coast cool and chamber music in this celebration of the 50th anniversary of "Time Out." This is the first-ever all-Brubeck album by a string quartet.
Though Jeremy Cohen came of age in a house suffused with classical music, there was no doubt about where Dave Brubeck ranked among the Old World masters. “Growing up in Oakland, my parents used to tell me about the four great B composers: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Brubeck,” he recalls.
Some four decades later, the violinist’s Grammy Award–nominated ensemble Quartet San Francisco has forged a singular synthesis of Brubeck’s West Coast cool and chamber music. On the group’s new album, QSF Plays Brubeck, Cohen takes classic Brubeck compositions like “Blue Rondo A La Turk,” “It’s a Raggy Waltz,” and “Three to Get Ready” and and arranges them for his string quartet, creating a gorgeous chamber jazz sound that’s both exquisitely detailed and rhythmically compelling.
It’s no coincidence that Cohen draws the majority of the compositions from the Dave Brubeck Quartet masterpieces Time Out and Time Further Out, albums that helped pave the way for unusual time signatures in jazz. The 50th anniversary of the release of Time Out has sent many listeners back to one of the most popular jazz albums in history. With QSF Plays Brubeck, Cohen lovingly examines the architecture of Brubeck’s music. Even a piece as ubiquitous as altoist Paul Desmond’s “Take Five” sounds utterly fresh, with interlocking lines that sing and swing.
“Brubeck has a big-bandish element to his piano choruses I wanted to capture,” Cohen says. “His music goes from simple to complex in a way that not many jazz compositions do. There’s incredible joy and simplicity in listening to his music, yet there are layers of complexity. On some arrangements I stuck to what Brubeck and Desmond did, and on others I extrapolated. The challenge was to do some of my own writing and improvisation within the project.”
The son of a cantor and a music professor, Jeremy was raised in a highly musical Oakland family along with his brothers Joshua, a conductor, and Joel, a cellist and former member of Quartet San Francisco. Though steeped in the European classical tradition—he trained with Anne Crowden in Berkeley and with Itzhak Perlman for two years in New York City—Cohen has spent the last three decades developing a far-ranging repertoire that enables him to fulfill his love of jazz, tango, and the Gypsy swing of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli.
“I wanted to play in front of an orchestra, soloing,” Cohen says. “But I didn’t want to play the same material that everybody else is competing to play. I have a lot of jazz in my background, so I went out and had a lot of this music created so I could satisfy myself. I always wanted to do my own thing.”
For Quartet San Francisco, Cohen has chosen a cast of collaborators well-versed in chamber music’s rigorous precision and open to jazz’s improvisational imperative. He founded the group in 2001, and its latest incarnation features the award-winning cellist Michelle Djokic, who served as assistant principal cellist of the San Francisco Symphony from 2005 to 2007. Djokic won a position with the New Century Chamber Orchestra in 2008, when she also recorded the Piazzolla Four Seasons as principal cellist with music director and violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. “Michelle is one of the most magnificent players I’ve ever worked with,” Cohen says.
Keith Lawrence, an Oberlin alum who recently completed graduate work at the DePaul University School of Music, holds down the viola chair. He spent three summers at the Henry Mancini Institute, where he first explored his interest in alternative styles (and where he met Cohen). Keith is a coach for San Francisco Symphony’s Opus program, which supports instrumental music programs in the city’s public middle and high schools.
The versatile violinist Alisa Rose completes QSF. An alumna of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, she’s also a skilled old-time fiddler who performs with the Picasso Quartet, the Real Vocal String Quartet, Homespun Rowdy, 49 Special, and A.J. Roach and the Strange Pilgrims. Alisa’s bluegrass band, 49 Special, won first place in the July 2009 band competition at Rocky Grass, an annual bluegrass festival which takes place in Lyons, Colorado.
Exploring Brubeck’s music was a natural progression for Cohen. He spent much of the 1980s as a first-call studio and session musician in Los Angeles, playing on numerous soundtracks, including The Dollmaker with Jane Fonda. He also spent four years as the featured fiddler on the soundtrack of The Dukes of Hazzard. Since returning to the San Francisco Bay Area, he has worked on a number of CD and soundtrack projects at Skywalker Sound in Nicasio, CA, including the Star Wars compilation CD with John Williams. He contributed to Santana’s Grammy-winning hit CD Supernatural, and served as concertmaster on recordings by Linda Ronstadt, Ray Charles, Aaron Neville, Howard Keel, and Dame Cleo Laine.
It was during his Southland sojourn that Cohen decided to launch his pioneering band ViolinJazz. An inventive quartet featuring veteran pianist Larry Dunlap, bassist Jim Kerwin, and guitarist Dix Bruce, the group focuses on pre-World War II hot jazz, particularly the great string players like Stephane Grappelli, Eddie South, Ray Nance, and Joe Venuti. ViolinJazz recorded two CDs of jazz standards, and in 2004 Video Artists International (VAI) released the DVD, Jeremy Cohen and Friends Celebrate Joe Venuti –100 Years.
“On one level it’s historical preservation, and on another level we play it because we love it,” Cohen says. “When we do things in the style of Joe Venuti, Grappelli, and Django, in a way we’re keeping alive the history of this Swing Era violin jazz.”
A man of many parts, Cohen has managed to perform at the highest level in multiple musical worlds. His orchestral arrangements have been featured by the San Francisco and Marin Symphonies, and he has been featured as soloist with the San Jose and San Francisco Chamber Orchestras; the Bay Area’s California and Peninsula Symphonies; the Reno and Reading (PA) Philharmonics; the Virginia Symphony; and the Cape Cod, Sun Valley, and Mendocino Music Festivals. He fulfilled his passion for tango through a two-year stint as the soloist in the popular, long-running San Francisco production of Forever Tango. And he spent a year and a half with acclaimed Turtle Island String Quartet in the mid-1990s.
Cohen has also devoted himself to education, whether teaching improvisation at the Stanford Jazz Workshop or through nine consecutive summer sessions as Jazz Violin faculty at the Henry Mancini Institute at UCLA in Los Angeles (he’s currently on faculty at the Jazzschool in Berkeley). In Quartet San Francisco, he has collaborated in the San Francisco Symphony’s music in schools program, performing for 15,000 elementary school students. It was while he was working with the SFS’s Adventures In Music program that he realized that the best way to reach young audiences was through music they could relate to.
“I wanted to develop some material for the quartet that swings, and since I couldn’t find it in stores I began to arrange it myself,” Cohen says. “The first few tunes I arranged were ‘Blue Rondo A La Turk,’ ‘Strange Meadowlark,’ and the ‘Pink Panther Theme.’ I also did some tangos, and just about anything else I was burning to play.”
Through all his various and far-flung projects, Cohen stayed connected to the capaciously talented Brubeck clan. He got to know Matthew Brubeck when the cellist (and youngest Brubeck son) lived in Oakland. Matt contributed the breathtaking arrangement of “The Duke,” his father’s classic mash note to Duke Ellington.
Cohen performed bassist/trombonist Chris Brubeck’s “Triple Concerto for Violin and Orchestra” at the Brubeck Festival at University of the Pacific in Stockton and worked with him for several years at the Mancini Institute in Los Angeles. It was Chris who suggested that Cohen arrange “The Golden Horn,” from the Brubeck Quartet’s Jazz Impressions of Eurasia, a seminal 1958 album that anticipated the better known time-signature experiments of the Time albums.
During a two-year residency at Mills College, where Dave Brubeck studied composition with Darius Milhaud in the mid 1940s, Quartet San Francisco performed some of the Brubeck material with Dave and his wife Iola in attendance. The prolific composer, who’s written for strings in several contexts, was pleased and gratified by the quartet’s interpretations, and encouraged Cohen to expand the project. QSF Plays Brubeck is a direct result of that encouragement, a loving birthday present to the Maestro as he turns 89.
“We see ourselves as expanding the literature for string quartet,” Cohen says. “Dave has created such a rich body of music. Chamber music needs to connect to people today, and his compositions provide everything you need: beautiful melodies, harmonic twists, fantastic rhythms. There’s so much more there. This album is just the start.”
Moods: Mood: Upbeat