Jazz Saxophonist Ventures into Classical Genre

Saxophonist and composer Quinsin Nachoff (courtesy of Braithwaite & Katz)

Pivotal Arc is an album of recent compositions by saxophonist Quinsin Nachoff. The advance material I received describes this as “boundary-crossing.” That phrase reminds me of days when I liked to call jazz an example of “chamber music by other means.” That is one way to approach the music on this album. The other would be to think of it as chamber music that can be described as “jazz by other means.” You pays your money; and you takes your choice (as they used to say). The album is scheduled for release this coming Friday, and Amazon.com has set up a Web page for processing pre-orders.

A lot of names from both classical and jazz genres are dropped in that advance material, so I would like to be bold enough to add another one to the pile. The second of the three works performed on this album is a string quartet played by the members of the Molinari String Quartet: violinists Olga Ranzenhofer and Antoine Bareil, violist Frédéric Lambert, and cellist Pierre-Alain Bouvrette. During my second encounter with this music, the phrase “long-winded Webern” came to mind.

To be clear, I did not think of this pejoratively. Anton Webern is still famous for his capacity for brevity, particularly in the chamber music genre. However, he packs so much into such short durations that spending less than a minute with one of his string quartet movements can be exhausting. One could labor for hours tracking down structural relations on the score page, which are so numerous that it is virtually impossible to account for most of them listening without the benefit of that score page.

Nachoff, on the other hand, brings an appreciation of prolongation to the four movements of his quartet, all of which are less than five minutes in duration. The mind behind the ear can relax a bit to take in the broad diversity of sonorities and the linear processes through which those sonorities unfold. One might almost say that Nachoff has provided an excellent ear-training study that will prepare a listener interested in exploring the six bagatelles for string quartet in Webern’s Opus 9 (music which, for the record, is now more than a century old).

Nachoff’s quartet amounts to a sharp contrast with the final track on the album, the one after which the album is named. This is basically a through-composed score that provides opportunities for improvisation. The resources are those of a jazz band; but a conductor (JC Sanford) is necessary to negotiate both the plan of the score and any improvised interjections. This is the selection that probably best fits the “chamber music by other means” category.

Violinist Nathalie Bonin (courtesy of Braithwaite & Katz)

The opening selection is a three-movement violin concerto. Nachoff composed the piece for violinist Nathalie Bonin, who has been his creative partner for a long time. Such a partnership arises with a fair amount of frequency in the overall history of music. Alban Berg’s violin concerto was commissioned by the violinist Louis Krasner. There is an often-told story that, when he first began to work on the concerto, Berg asked Krasner to go in another room and just explore the sorts of sonorities he could elicit from his instrument. Berg could then proceed to write his score around the results of his listening to Krasner. (This is one of those stories that, even if false, deserves to be true!)

My guess is that, through his partnership with Bonin, Nachoff was more than adequately informed about what she could do with her instrument. The result makes for a significant structural departure from what one expects of a violin concerto; but the same can be said of Berg’s concerto, which could probably be better described as a tone poem. Bonin is given several extended solo cadenza passages, and I would be willing to hypothesize that those passages provided opportunities for her own inventions. Unless I am mistaken, there is even a throw-away reference to Ludwig van Beethoven at the end of one of those cadenzas.

Taken as a whole, the concerto is the major work on the album; but, in many respects, it is also the most accessible, particularly in terms of the ways in which it gives equal priority to jazz and classical rhetorics.