Jack Quartet

JACK Quartet – Jason Eckardt: Passage (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:31 minutes | 1,16 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © KAIROS

We’re the JACK Quartet, a string quartet that champions music by 20th- and 21st-century composers.

We curate and perform programs that include a variety of musical styles by established and emerging artists. With each program, we aspire to create transformative experiences. The music we play asks audiences to listen with their whole beings. With close listening, music has the power to broaden perspectives.

Since our founding in 2005, we have been introducing audiences world-wide to a range of experimental chamber music. We perform everywhere from classical music halls to art galleries to bars. We commission new music and collaborate with composers to bring it to life. We commit to helping dismantle outmoded classical music pipelines for composers through our JACK Studio program, which includes residencies, commissions, readings, and recordings. We’re the Quartet in Residence at The New School in New York City, and we teach at music festivals, conservatories, and universities.

(more…)

JACK Quartet – John Luther Adams: Everything That Rises (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 56:21 minutes | 2,31 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Cold Blue Music

There is no connection between the John Luther Adams discussed here, born in 1953, and the famous minimalist composer John Coolidge Adams, born in 1947. Presented here is John Luther Adams’ fourth string quartet Everything that Rises; for the record, the composer received the very prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2014 – a prize previously awarded to Copland, Ives, Hanson, Thompson, Menotti, Barber, Carter, Crumb, Rorem, Corigliano, Gould and many others. He himself describes his music style as ”profoundly influenced by the natural world. By listening deeply to the subtle resonances of the northern soundscape, I try to explore the territory of ‘sonic geography’, that region between place and culture, between environment and imagination.”: a worthy programme, no doubt, and it’s true that listening to his Quartet conveys an impression of large open spaces, and the continuous use of intervals from the natural scale – i.e. notes as they are created by the natural harmonic resonance of sounding bodies, generating intervals rather removed from what we are used to with the well-tempered scale – successfully erases any reference to even the most avant-garde classical harmony. Furthermore, the piece plays in one go totaling about one hour rather than being split into tracks, which the partition doesn’t really allow, but a savvy label would have found a way around it, if only at arbitrary spots in the most strategic moments! Because such moments are numerous! The listener has therefore no choice but to listen from end to end and let themselves be hypnotised.
(more…)

JACK Quartet – Filigree: Music of Hannah Lash (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 55:37 minutes | 974 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © New Focus Recordings

Hannah Lash’s multi-layered music balances rhetoric with sensuality and enters into a dialogue with pre-existent forms while simultaneously reexamining them. On this excellent recording of her music for string quartet by the JACK Quartet, we hear Lash’s engagement with two canonic traditions as points of inspiration (the Baroque Suite as well as an extra musical discipline — tapestry arts from the Middle Ages), alongside two works that concern themselves with instrumental and musical phenomenon.
(more…)

JACK Quartet – John Luther Adams: Lines Made by Walking (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 54:50 minutes | 1,01 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Cold Blue Music

Composer John Luther Adams writes music of environmental inspiration, often of quite a direct sort. One might wonder how it translates to the medium of the string quartet, often thought of as abstract, but the format focuses the mind on the slightly shifting phases and intervals that are the meat of Adams’ minimalist style. The first work here, Lines Made by Walking, is explicitly programmatic: it depicts scenes from a hike and thus consists of (musical) lines made by walking. It is, however, as spare in its mode of expression as any other minimalist composition, with falling musical figures in all three movements that flatten out a bit as the hiker reaches a ridgeline in the middle movement. The second work, untouched, has the more abstract movement titles “Rising,” “Crossing,” and “Falling”; the work explores open string sonorities and harmonics. In its slow evolutions, it is of a piece with Lines Made by Walking, and the listener without guidance might not guess which piece had a specific nature program. The JACK Quartet conveys the monumental quality of Adams’ music well, and listeners who enjoy the string quartets of Philip Glass will likely take naturally to this pair.
(more…)