Kronos
Quartet: David Harrington (left),
John Sherba, Jennifer Culp,
and Hank Dutt.
Photo
by Jay Blakesburg
Plaza Garibaldi, in Mexico
City, is the Mariachi band capitol of the world. A kind of Mariachi
marketplace, Garibaldi is where you go when you require a band to
play for a party, a wedding, a christening. At Plaza Garibaldi, you
will encounter anywhere between 50 and 100 such groups at any time
of the day. This seething multitude of brass and strings—blaring
out dozens of different songs, all at once, at spirited volume, all
throughout the square—produces a truly indescribable sound: a
vast, happy hubbub of rumpus and clamor and music.
"It is," laughs
David Harrington, founder, violinist, and artistic director of Kronos
Quartet, "one of the maddest, wildest, most life-affirming sounds
I've ever heard."
Such sounds—Garabaldi
at midnight, the pulsing street traffic of Tijuana, the piercing squawk
of an old transistor radio, the competing peels and pops of church
bells and fireworks on Mexican Independence Day—are the surprising
soundscape that runs through, over, under, and straight down the middle
of Nuevo (Nonesuch), the ear-bending, ground-breaking new release
from Kronos Quartet. Two years in the making, Nuevo is a full-throttle
celebration of the multitextured sounds of Mexico—and as its
name implies, the effort represents a whole new direction for Kronos
Quartet.
"We very much wanted
something that was new for us," agrees Harrington, relaxing in
Kronos' cozy rehearsal space in San Francisco. "What we wanted
to do, actually, was to make a film—the sonic equivalent
of a film. We wanted—through the use of our music, through the
use of the sounds of Mexico—to make connections we haven't made
before, to take the listener right into this wonderful culture that
we've all come to love."
So, what does Mexico
sound like?
"Rawness," says
Harrington, with a slowly emerging grin. "We wanted to capture
the rawness of a Mexican soundscape. It's a sound I've heard every
time I’ve ever been there. It's an absolute absurdity of sounds.
It's never knowing what you'll be hearing next."
It's exactly that—the
never knowing what you'll be hearing next—that best describes
Kronos Quartet itself. Aside from the technical precision and remarkable
emotional power of the playing, it is the sheer force of Kronos' unpredictability
that has propelled it through 28 years, 38 albums, thousands of appearances,
countless awards, and over 400 original pieces composed expressly
for the quartet. Indeed, few other ensembles have been as tirelessly
devoted to the work of contemporary composers. Of Nuevo's 14
cuts, five were commissioned for the album, and all 14 feature arrangements
that push older material—Margarita Lecuona's 1941 piece "Taboo,"
or the traditional love song "El Llorar"—into radically,
and frequently gorgeous light.
With the release of Nuevo,
Kronos Quartet—violinists Harrington and John Sherba, violist
Hank Dutt, and cellist Jennifer Culp—has tackled its most technologically
complex album, employing a team of sound engineers to perform one
auditory miracle after another, turning the accomplished string players
into whistlers, guitarists, percussionists, a 1,000-string orchestra,
and—in Nuevo's opening track, "El Sinaloense"—into
a Mariachi-like brass band. The project required over 30 intense days
of post-production. To Harrington, eagerly playing portions of the
CD on the rehearsal room's stereo, the work was well worth it.
"Just for the look
on Jennifer's face," recalls Harrington, referring to cellist
Culp, "when we brought her into the studio, and, for the first
time, she heard her cello—sounding just like a tuba. That’s
something I'll never forget."
One of the album's standout
cuts is a cover of the late Juan Garcia Esquivel's classic 1968 tune
"Mini Skirt," a vibrant piece of work that interlaces offbeat
string playing with a bevy of whistles and voices and kicky repetitions
of words like "Wow!" and "Aaah!" It's no accident
that Kronos has included a piece by Esquivel; it was the technological
innovations of Esquivel—the legendary exotica bandleader who
died in Mexico in early January—that inspired Kronos to attempt
a sonic movie.
"Esquivel certainly
was a catalyst," Harrington says. "We were inspired by Esquivel's
use of sound, his sense of playfulness." The model for Nuevo,
in part, was Esquivel's experimental record See It in Sound,
recorded in 1961 but not released until last year. The innovative
album takes listeners up and down the street, in and out of noisy
bars and clubs, each of which features a band playing a different
version of the same song. "See It in Sound," says
Harrington, "was certainly one of the starting points for Nuevo."
The other inspiration,
of course, was what Harrington calls, "the diverse buffet of
sonic information that is Mexico," from the one-armed leaf-player
who sounds like an eerie master violinist (his playing is featured
on Nuevo's fifth cut, "Perfidia") to the sidewalk
organ-grinder, so out of tune that Harrington actually burst into
tears upon hearing it ("Cuatro Milpas"), to the mad, wild,
life-affirming cacophony of Plaza Garibaldi itself ("Cafe Tacuba's
12/12").
"I can't wait for
this album to come out," smiles Harrington. "I really can't
wait for our friends and fans to hear it! Whatever they expect from
Kronos, they're probably not expecting this!"
