Kronos Quartet - In Formation (1982 Reissue) (1990)

Kronos is a musical institution over 40 years in existence, championing and commissioning contemporary, even avant-garde and multimedia, classical compositions but the quartet started slow, in a period of experimentation when classical, rock, and jazz began to explore each other's domain. The Turtle Island Quartet, founded in 1985, shares similar roots, and the chamber jazz group Oregon, founded in 1971, also skirts Third Steam with their bass, guitar, oboe, and percussion. Kronos tackled Thelonious Monk jazz classics in 1985 and those of Bill Evans the following year, but they also recorded quartets of minimalist, idiosyncratic Terry Riley in 1985. Since their 1986 breakthrough recording on Nonesuch with pieces by Peter Sculthorpe, Aulis Sallinen, Philip Glass, Conlon Nancarrow, and an arrangement of Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze, they have been extraordinarily successful and have educated audiences around the world to novel and sociologically important music. Looking at the photograph of the quartet in this album, taken between 1979 and 1982, and recalling their appearance today (with Joan Jeanrenaud, cello, replaced with Sunny Yang), I am struck how very young and bold they were, long-haired and mustachioed per the era. As today, the tracks of this opus 1, 1979, recording were composed by others, here by Derek Thunes and Ken Benshoof and Alan Dorsey, two each, John Whitney, Hunt Beyer, John Geist, and David Kechley. These pieces on the 34-minute album are to large extent influenced by rock, blues, and jazz. They are lyrical, rhythmic, comfortable but also by the standard's of today, simple and safe (although Beyer's Enantiodromia High [referring to cycling into opposites] is strange. In Formation, of course, is important in the history of Kronos and in experimental popular music of the 1980s. The fine technique of the musicians and the addition of percussion and other sounds are already established, and they soon would become more daring, expanding their own ears, as ours.