"A perfect encapsulation of today’s trends in chamber music." - The Washington Post
“…enormously creative, always attention grabbing, sometimes funny.” - The New York Times
CURRENT PROJECT
WHAT IS AMERICAN?
Following up to their GRAMMY-nominated album Freedom and Faith, What Is American features an amalgamation of styles that trace their roots to American Indigenous and Black music. The title is intended as both a question and a statement: the question interrogates our nation’s complex musical traditions, while the statement projects traditions forward.
The project features the of legendary multi-instrumentalist and composer Roscoe Mitchell’s CARDS 11-11-2020. The composition incorporates Mitchell's groundbreaking CARDS technique in which cards containing musical excerpts are collaged in ways that inspire the freely-improvised section at the heart of the piece. The project also includes Vijay Iyer’s 2012 string quartet Dig the Say, a four-movement homage to the music of James Brown, and Rhiannon Giddens’s heartbreaking song At the Purchaser’s Option (arr. PUBLIQuartet) which is inspired by an 1830s advertisement announcing the sale of a Black woman and her child.
Surrounding and contextualizing those works are four new takes on PUBLIQuartet’s ongoing MIND | THE | GAP project, in which the group uses improvisation to highlight connections between diverse musical genres. First is a reimagination of Antonín Dvořák’s “American” Quartet, which like his New World Symphony composed just before it, was inspired by American Indigenous and Black music. The other three MIND | THE | GAP selections take inspiration from some of America’s most revolutionary creative voices— Fats Waller’s “Honeysuckle Rose” is refashioned as a tribute to Madam C. J. Walker, the pioneering Black entrepreneur, self-made millionaire, and activist, with narration by special guest A’Lelia Bundles who is Walker’s great-great-granddaughter. On the next track themes from “Law Years” and “Street Woman” from Ornette Coleman’s 1972 album Science Fiction weave together in a freely-improvised setting. The remaining selections are developed as a four movement set dubbed Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues which honors four women who left indelible marks on American music history: Tina Turner, Betty Davis, Alice Coltrane and Ida Cox.
Interspersed with these pieces are four original compositions by PUBLIQuartet collectively titled Fifth Verse that uses the text of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s U.S. Civil War-era fifth verse from “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A century and a half later, when Black Lives Matter is still a subject for protest, the line “the millions unchain’d who our birthright have gained” takes on an all too relevant meaning in the year 2022. After a complete reading of the verse in “Prelude,” fragments of it return throughout the album in a slowly unfolding reminder about what has been and what has yet to be accomplished.
This project has been featured at Metropolitan Museum of Art, Caramoor, Lincoln Center, Van Cliburn Dumbarton Oaks, Wright African American History Museum and many, many others.
BIO.
(see artist page www.efperformances.com/publiquartet)
TOURING CONFIGURATIONS
Quartet
