Word: quartets
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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COLLABORATION: THE MODERN JAZZ QUARTET WITH LAURINDO ALMEIDA (Atlantic). The M.J.Q. and the Brazilian guitarist seem meant for each other, like gin and vermouth. Not that they are intoxicating; their colors are muted, their moods refined, their rhythms subtle. They can swing, but seldom do. In Bach's A Minor Fugue they demonstrate delicate counterpoint, and in the Adagio from the Concierto de Aranjuez they conjure up a lavender twilight as the guitar gently punctures the lingering ring of the vibraharp...
...MONK'S TIME (Thelonious Monk Quartet; Columbia). Monk stubbornly hammered out his style when nobody much cared, still has plenty to say now that he is in a continuous spotlight. Using his own dies to cut the rhythms and shape the harmonies, he remakes each song (Nice Work if You Can Get It, Memories of You). Lulu's Back in Town is one of his better top-to-toe transformations...
With that sort of prospectus, the St. Louis-born Tangier expatriate was ordained as the high priest of the beats even before his first "novel," Naked Lunch, was off the Grove press. Now, in his second of what promises to be a Doomsday Quartet, Burroughs invokes a personal and "very inglorious Pantheon to give the modern world the needle in the same way Zeus and his gang broke up the ancient one." His Zenlike Zeus is the Persian Hassan-i-Sabbah, prophet of an 11th century cult of hashish takers...
GIAN FRANCESCO MALIPIERO: RISPETTI E STRAMBOTTI FOR STRING QUARTET (Nonesuch). The highly melodious, archaic music of the 82-year-old Italian composer too seldom gets a hearing. Abandoning formal movements, he has strung together 20 "stanzas" in celebration of old Italian poetry. He also celebrates the sound of strings, even reveling in what seem like tuning-up exercises. There is a contagious spontaneity in this reissue by the Stuyvesant Quartet, who on the other side play Hindemith's youthful and exuberant String Quartet...
...HAYDN: QUARTETS OPUS 3, NO. 5; OPUS 33, NO. 2; OPUS 76, NO. 2 (London). A sampling from three periods of Haydn's music, mileposts in the early history of the string quartet. The earliest, nicknamed "The Serenade," sounds like party music played by strolling strings. "The Joke" is more serious; its nickname comes from Haydn's wager that the ladies would talk before the music ended. The last of the three shows Haydn at his richest and most complex. The members of the Janácek Quartet from Czechoslovakia play the works from memory, but they play...