Marsalis Melds Jazz With String Quartet

There are a few examples of jazz musicians turning to the string quartet--Gershwin wrote three small movements; Ornette Coleman once tried to do something avant-garde with one; Kronos has had straightforward transcriptions of Thelonius Monk and Bill Evans tunes made for it. All lose something crucial in the translation.

Not so “At the Octoroon Balls,” the string quartet Wynton Marsalis wrote for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in 1995. It was heard on the West Coast for the first time Thursday night when the Society brought it to the Irvine Barclay Theatre under the joint auspices of the Laguna Chamber Music Society and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County.

Marsalis is a genuine classicist. As a trumpet player, he is a brilliant classical musician. As a jazz composer, arranger and improviser, he is so much the neo-classicist that you sense his awareness of and relationship to the history of jazz music in every phrase he is responsible for.

Yet Marsalis is also something else. He is a jiver. He likes to call his classicism romanticism because he thinks that’s more seductive, and there is nothing that Marsalis seems to like better than to be seductive. He loves to show off. And unlike most jazz musicians who cross over into the classical realm, he is neither intimidated by the traditions nor does he stiffen up when faced with the need for so much notation.

The four movements of “At the Octoroon Balls” presented Thursday do nothing but show off. They don’t hesitate to use historical jazz styles, be they insinuating rag, foot-stomping call-and-response or that classic accelerating train-engine chugging effect, complete with whistle.

But Marsalis everywhere finds ways to allude to 20th century string quartet techniques as well, interrupting motion with Stravinsky’s dissonances, breaking into cadenzas full of Debussy’s impressionistic harmonies and throwing in lots of clever sound effects (such as the first violin plucking in a way that imitates the sound of right-hand repeated chords on an old upright piano).

The real cleverness, though, is that Marsalis has found a way to notate music for a traditional ensemble that would stymie just about any other jazz composer. Thursday night, the Chamber Music Society’s Orion String Quartet found its way into the music convincingly, although the effort did show.

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At Lincoln Center, the Society can sometimes seem a bit casual--busy professionals operating on automatic pilot. On the road, however, they are better prepared, less distracted and more energized by new surroundings.

The touring ensemble on this occasion also included two of the Society’s best-known players, violinist Ida Kavafian and cellist Fred Sherry, who opened the evening with a strident but effective performance of Ravel’s strident but effective Sonata for Violin and Cello.

After intermission, all six players turned to Tchaikovsky’s sextet, “Souvenir de Florence.” There is little that sounds Italian in this typically Russian score, but there also wasn’t much that sounded Russian in the playing of it. Instead, the reading was animated and rhapsodic and even a little jazzy in a daredevil American way, as if Marsalis’ plucky spirit, and a dash of his jive, had insinuated its way into all that the players did this evening. It was more than welcome.