World on a String

Whether plucked, bowed, or struck, stringed instruments are played in every corner of the globe. Next weekend, April 20-22, the SFJAZZ Spring Season features some of the world’s most talented practitioners on these varied chordophones.

The guitar is perhaps the world's best-known stringed instrument. Some 5000 years ago, the ancestor to the guitar emerged from central Asia. The instrument’s etymology traces its path west through Persia (sitar), Arabia (qitar) Greece (kithara), and Spain (guitarra). Though the varieties of guitar-like instruments are manifest, ranging from the middle-eastern oud to the renaissance lute to the American resonator, the six stringed guitar emerged as the predominant model in the 18th century, and made its way across the Atlantic during the colonial era. 

Four Hands, One Guitar (YouTube)

Assad Brothers Concert (NPR)

Turtle Island Quartet demonstrates how they achieve the sound of a jazz band with strings (YouTube)

TIQ Jukebox

In the talented hands of the Assad Brothers the classical guitar is anything but ordinary. Their Brazilian-Lebanese musical legacy nicely encapsulates the guitar’s long trek west, and they hail from a stringed dynasty that includes father Jorge (mandolin), sister Badi (guitarist and singer), and Sergio’s daughter Clarice (pianist and composer), the Assad’s have been hailed as “the best two-guitar team in existence, maybe in history” (Washington Post). The gifted brothers join San Francisco’s world-renowned Turtle Island Quartet (TIQ) for two shows at the Herbst Theatre on April 21.

TIQ has made its name stretching the boundaries of the string quartet (two violins, viola, and cello) beyond the classical repertoire. Its latest album, A Love Supreme: The Legacy of John Coltraneis a tribute to the late jazz saxophonist. In his liner notes for the album, jazz critic Bob Blumenthal notes that listeners “will be pleasantly surprised at how a so-called chamber ensemble can meet [Coltrane’s] rhythmic and emotional demands without flinching.”

The Portuguese guitar (“guitarra”) bears a strong resemblance to an inverted heart, a subtle visual metaphor for its traditional use as accompaniment for the lovelorn fado. One of Portugal’s most popular recording artists, singer Dulce Pontes, performing at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre April 20, was at the vanguard of reinvigorating the fado and her latest album, O Coração Tem Três Portas, is a return to the traditional acoustic music of Portugal. Pontes will be backed by a diversity of stringed instruments including the Portuguese guitar, the ten-stringed bragues, steel stringed guitars, and a cello.

Sunday, April 22, finds two unique musicians from opposite sides of the Atlantic coming together in a unique collaboration at Florence Gould Theatre. Bandoneonist Dino Saluzzi worked with cellist Anja Lechner and her Rosamunde Quartet on 1999’s Kultrum. The two have continued to work together to phenomenal results. Their debut release Ojos Negros “is that rarest of albums: one where the emotions run so deep and the sense of communion so strong that even though it is based on formal structure it sounds fresh with each and every listen” (All About Jazz).

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