Ébène Presents Chamber and Jazz in One Gig

Ébène Quartet members Raphaël Merlin, Pierre Colombet, Marie Chilemme, and Gabriel Le Magadure (photograph by Julien Mignot, courtesy of SFP)

Last night the Ébène Quartet (Quatuor Ébène) returned to San Francisco to give its fourth San Francisco Performances concert. In the past they have performed in both the Jazz Series and the Chamber Series. In the absence of a Jazz Series this season, they prepared a program for the Shenson Chamber Series that presented string quartets by Joseph Haydn and Leoš Janáček in the first half and then provided a jazz gig for the second. Originally an all-male ensemble, the group used to cultivate a “bad boy” image, such as the photograph taken by La Jungle for the inner pages of their Fiction CD:

Ébène Quartet founders Mathieu Herzog, Raphaël Merlin, Pierre Colombet, and Gabriel Le Magadure

This did not always go down well with some of their chamber music performances. However, when violist Marie Chilemme replace Colombet, things tended to sober up a bit; and Chilemme seems to have satisfied a need for focus that has served both chamber and jazz offerings equally well.

This was particularly important on the jazz side, for which all selections were announced from the stage by Merlin. Indeed, Merlin credited the arrangements for the first two selections, Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints” and Miles Davis’ “Milestones,” to the Turtle Island String Quartet. Merlin went as far as to acknowledge Turtle Island with inspiring Ébène to move into the jazz genre. Since I still have my copy of the first CD that Turtle Island released, I appreciated their being cited as much as the techniques through which Ébène cultivated their “responses” to the “call” of Turtle Island.

According to my records, two of the jazz offerings in this portion of the program had previously been performed here as encore selections. These were “Ana Maria” (Shorter again) and “Libertango” by Astor Piazzolla. However, given the current political climate, the most timely selection was their decision to play Charles Mingus’ “Fables of Faubus.”

My guess is that there is now at least one generation of listeners that do not appreciate the significance of that title. It refers to Orval Faubus, who was governor of Arkansas in 1957, when he called out the National Guard to prevent nine African American teenagers from entering Little Rock Central High School. Mingus wrote words to go with this tune (including “Two, four, six, eight: They brainwash and teach you hate.”); but Ébène provided a music-only account. (For that matter, Columbia Records would not allow Mingus and Dannie Richmond to sing them at their recording session.)

The chamber music selections were equally engaging and, perhaps, even a bit provocative. The Haydn selection was the Hoboken III/34 quartet in D major, the fourth of the six quartets published as Opus 20. These were the first quartets in which Haydn began to explore adventurous (and occasionally provocative) approaches to composing for string quartet. Ébène easily negotiated the many twists and turns of Haydn’s inventiveness, making for a delightful edge-of-your-seat listening experience.

This was followed by Leoš Janáček’s first quartet, given the name “Kreutzer Sonata” based on the novella of that title by Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy’s tale is one of an “eternal triangle,” which made it interesting that the quartet membership should have one woman (the unfaithful wife in Tolstoy’s narrative) and three men (husband, lover, and narrator). However, the music itself is not narrative in nature. Rather, each of the four movements reflects on the intense shadows behind each of the episodes in Tolstoy’s tale. Ironically, all of these episodes unfold at the same “Con moto” tempo; but each one discloses its own palette of emotional dispositions.

Mind you, the same can be said of the expressiveness of all of the offerings in the entire Ébène program!