STRATHCONA STRING QUARTET, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

BLUE BY FOUR STRATHCONA STRING QUARTET
CD Release Party
Where: Yardbird Suite, 10203 86th Ave.
When: 2 p.m. Sunday
Tickets: $10 at the door

There's no law that says classical players can't play jazz, but it certainly packs a special challenge. Violinist Jennifer Bustin, founder of the Strathcona String Quartet, knows all about that. As the group prepares to release its jazzy second recording Blue By Four, she will tell you that "it's all in the rhythm."

"Other music -- Bartok or whatever -- has its own challenges but with jazz, rhythm is the whole issue."

Over 15 varied tracks, the hour-plus disc offers a mix of standards from 'Round Midnight and In the Mood to original tunes, all arranged and/or composed by the group's senior violinist, George Andrix.

While viola player Moni Mathew and cellist Josephine van Lier complete the quartet, two guest jazz players, trumpeter Joel Grey and bassist John Taylor, who plays in the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, join as soloists and add to the sense of swing. Quartet members play a few solo features too.

For his role, Andrix agrees that rhythm and arranging are crucial in translating a jazz feeling to string quartet music.

Like many classical players, he was initially wary of trying to improvise.

"Most of us spend so much time trying to duplicate as precisely as possible what's on that piece of paper," he says.

"It wasn't until the last 10 or 15 years that I got the courage to stand up and try and take a solo. But I've always been interested in jazz and often drew on jazz influences for my regular classical compositions."

Maybe it's not so unusual that the quartet is taking this little adventure. They enjoy a wide range of influences, experiences and side interests. The group's past repertoire has mixed up the classics and contemporary composers, and included a collaboration with Mile Zero Dance Company. Andrix also explored jazz-oriented works on the group's debut disc (2004, Arktos).

Edmonton native Bustin founded the quartet in 1987 when she was a music undergrad at the University of Alberta. She wanted to satisfy the needs of student composers and take advantage of performance opportunities. Along the way, she fell in love with making chamber music.

Chicago-born Andrix joined the quartet in 1995 following a position in the ESO and even a hiatus from music that saw him become a sheep farmer. He became an avid jazz fan in college, when he also played saxophone.

Dutch-born cellist Josephine van Lier joined the quartet shortly after her move here in 1995. One of the busiest musicians in Edmonton, she can be seen playing in the ESO or many other chamber settings.

Edmonton's Moni Mathew, the only member with jazz training from Grant MacEwan College, joined in 2004, taking over the viola.

Over the years they've done their share of busking, especially at the Old Strathcona Farmers Market.

Strathcona String Quartet Sets Place At The Table for Blues Alongside Classical

An Arts Jasper November 23, 2005 Concert Review
by Gregory Deagle
Jasper Booster

The recital began with Beethoven's String Quartet in B Flat Major, Opus 130. At a playing time of approximately forty five minutes, this mature work written when the great composer had succumbed to nearly total deafness, ranks among one of the longest compositions for string quartet in music history.

It's six ambitious movements chart a difficult course through bizarre syncopations and challenging entrances punctuated now and then by abrupt changes in tempo, so abrupt in fact that the piece seemed to occasionally morph into an altogether different piece resulting in a provocative psychological tension. One listener even suggested with this composition Beethoven breached the limits of traditionalism by venturing perilously close to the avant garde. As eccentric a work as it is, the Strathcona String Quartet met with every one of it's demands with due competence and elegance particularly in the Finale where an industrious basso line kept violist Moni Mathew well occupied.

With bio-notes that read like an eventful Jack London novel, an unassuming violinist, composer and conductor named George Andrix complements the Edmonton-based Quartet's line-up. Andrix introduced the Shostakovich String Quartet No. 8 in C Minor, Opus 110, starkly known as "In Memory Of The Victims Of Fascism And War," with a sobering preamble.

Dmitri Shostakovich was an embittered Russian composer, he explained, whose genius and personality were more than out of place in the Stalinist Russia of the thirties and forties. As a convinced believer in Russian Socialism, Shostakovich was brutally attacked in the official Soviet newspaper 'Pravda' for leftist distortion in 1936. Realizing it was a fight to the death for his conscience as an artist and creator, he shunned society for fifteen years. During this time he wrote five symphonies and several string quartets including the 8th Quartet, an opus which he firmly insisted would be his last. Luckily, for Western music it wasn't.

Typical of all of Shostakovich's works, the 8th Quartet is marked by emotional extremes, tragic intensity, grotesque and bizarre wit, humour, parody and savage sarcasm. He even "signed" the indictment with the melody of his musical monogram, DSCH (D, E-flat, C, B). This somewhat eerie grouping of notes forms a sort of tonal motif that recurs throughout the piece as it moves from one tragic movement to the next, the third being the Allegretto or "Dance Of Death" as it is commonly known. This grim passage is adorned with a sardonic trill that quivers vulnerably like a pale leaf in a shrill wind.

In the atmosphere of the Great Terror that gripped Russia, Stalin's KGB officers would comb the streets ruthlessly apprehending innocent civilians and intelligentsia. The Largo movement featured a sinister build-up of minor chords culminating in three aggressively executed down bows. Convincingly played, this clever piece of musical drama evoked the KGB's dreaded knocks on doors behind which entire families feared for their lives.For a program so entrenched in deliciously morose works of tortured genius, the Aaron Copland-like "Bashaw Boogie" written by Alberta composer, Roger Deegan and George Andrix's "Shades Of Blue" were informal and delightful. Andrix comes by his proficiency with blues honestly having composed, produced, played all the parts and even sang on his own CD, The Complete Blues Viola. "Shades Of Blue" took the audience on a sort of musical tour through blues inventions and studies. From deconstructing then reconstructing blues chords ("Reconstruction") to a loose, improvisational jam ("Wandering Boogie"), these five short pieces displayed the lighter side of string music while setting a congenial place at the table for blues alongside classical.

Jasper was left in awe of the Strathcona String Quartet's outstanding
degree of musical understanding and professionalism, and their apparent
comfort level in undertaking and performing works that run the gamut of
human experience.

Classical string quartet swings to the rhythm of jazz