Still pushing the boundaries

Kronos Quartet members (from left) Hank Dutt, John Sherba, David Harrington and Jennifer Culp.

There's a lot of ass to be kicked," quips Kronos Quartet violinist David Harrington, "like the idea that the best music has already been done."

Thirty-two years on, Harrington and Kronos are still kicking away, and not only in the concert hall. Five years ago, the American quartet was part of the eerie backdrop for the film of Hubert Selby's Requiem for a Dream and last year they were a wild presence on Dave Matthew's album Before These Crowded Streets, inspiring Harrington to bring up the elusive factor of "sawability - a quality in music where you can just get down to it and saw the strings in half".

You won't find the term in any music dictionary, nor will you find many of the 500 or so composers whose works Kronos have played. Names like the Azerbaijan Franghiz Ali-Zadeh and Hindi film composer Rahul Dev Burman - it's their music that Kronos will be bringing to New Zealand in the coming weeks.

Harrington is proud to be a musician and "I want to be sure that we're playing music that feels like the right music to be playing at any point".

He's winding down after a concert in Calgary, looking at the CDs all over his hotel room floor and thinking just how much there is to do. "That's what I mean when I say there's a lot of ass to be kicked."

There are discoveries every day. A San Francisco taxi driver recently turned him on to Koranic singing, playing him three different cassettes. "I was totally ignorant of this kind of singing, so I went out and got as many recordings of Koran as I could.

"Every day I have a lot of gratitude to those early architects of the string quartet, composers like Haydn and Beethoven. But I remember looking at the map one day when I was a young kid and thinking how there was certainly African music in Haydn's time. If Beethoven had heard Indian ragas I think he would have been affected by it. Musicians share music with each other and if you find something that moves you or magnetises you try to include it in the world that you know."

There are 64 albums listed on the Kronos website, 40 of their own, along with various appearances on CDs by the likes of Nelly Furtado, Joan Armatrading and soundtracks such as 21 Grams.

Their own discs range from a funky collaboration with the late King of Tango, Astor Piazzolla, to a scintillating visit to the world's most mysterious continent in 1992's Pieces of Africa.

In 2003 they went wild south of the border in Nuevo, with dance mixes, 101 Strings imitations and a brilliant leaf musician, Carlos Garcia.

'I heard Carlos live nearly 10 years ago when I took my family to Mexico for Christmas," Harrington remembers. "We were out walking and I kept hearing a sound like a beautiful violin. We tracked it down and, as we got closer and closer the sound got stranger and stranger until we were right next to him. I looked at the instrument and it was an ivy leaf. Not only this but the man only had one arm. I thought it was so beautiful. We found a field recording of him playing Perfidia and basically we wanted to be his back-up band."

Kronos's New Zealand programme will feature Alexandra du Bois' An Eye for An Eye Makes The Whole World Blind, commissioned through the quartet's under-30 programme.

"It will always be a very special piece," Harrington says, "because it was written by a 21-year-old American woman during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq. It really is a meditation on the tremendous sadness of that moment."

Perhaps in the final count he feels that music is too honest and direct to be a political battering-ram. "There's this whole uncontrollable response that music can generate that is within every person. It's very private and very personal ... when you get down to it, it's beyond words."

Michael Gordon's Potassium, which opens the Kronos programme, sounds pretty full-on.

"In-your-face is a good place to be when you're starting a concert," Harrington says.

There are two other homegrown pieces. One is Steve Reich's Triple Quartet, in which Kronos play with overlaid tapes of themselves, to make "a really expressive piece in which Steve has been influenced by our recording of the Schnittke Quartets to propel his music into a wider harmonic sphere".

The other is a transcription of Charles Mingus' Myself When I Am Real.

On the meditative side, Oasis, by Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, is as welcome as its title suggests. Magical with a lot of bold brilliant colours.

Kronos's 2000 Caravan album gave us a taste of the sinuous music of Rahul Dev Burman - one track in which the four musicians were joined by another AK05 visitor, tabla player Zakir Hussain.

On Wednesday we're in for a suite of Burman's songs. "He's such an inspired composer. And I say this after listening to 600 or 700 of his songs."

That's true devotion. Exactly how much time does this man devote to his music? "Twenty-three and a half hours a day," Harrington laughs. "The other half hour I spend in the shower."

Kronos: An album primer

Nuevo (Nonesuch): Kronos go south of the border with the tang of tequila in the soundscape . If you thought Osvaldo Golijov was a little over-serious, catch his OTT arrangement of Esquivel's Mini Skirt.

Mugam Sayagi (Nonesuch): The new Kronos disc reveals the mesmeric music of Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, including Oasis and an unforgettable sampling of the composer's own piano stylings.

Caravan (Nonesuch): A musical trip around Eastern Europe, including Terry Riley's moving tribute on the death of his son, Goilijov arranging Billie Holiday's Gloomy Sunday and an unexpected take on a Dick Dale surf classic, Misirilou Twist.

LOWDOWN

WHO: The Kronos Quartet

MEMBERS: David Harrington (violin), John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola), Jennifer Culp (cello)

PLAYING: Auckland Town Hall, Wednesday February 23; WOMAD, New Plymouth, Saturday, March 12 (11pm-midnight), Sunday, March 13, 2pm-3pm)