The jazz inflections of Elliott Miles McKinley's music can be traced back to recordings he heard in his childhood, and they are prominent in his string quartet music as a natural outgrowth of a strong lyrical impulse. The Martinu Quartet's 2011 album of the String Quartets No. 4, No. 5, and No. 6 demonstrates not only the jazz-inspired content of McKinley's scores, but also the sensibility of improvisation that infuses such spontaneous playing. Recorded in Prague, Czech Republic, between 2001 and 2010, these performances have the free feeling of conversational exchanges that are essential characteristics of jazz and chamber music, and the musicians seem fully attuned to the hybrid idiom here. Such lively repartee is necessary to keep the music suspended, as it were, above the page, rather than weighted by the precision of notation. This release from Navona is a partial reissue, because the performances of the String Quartet No. 4 and the String Quartet No. 5 were released on a 2006 album from MMC, while the recording of the String Quartet No. 6 is dated 2010; collectors who own the earlier CD will notice the overlap. The sound of this album is slightly variable, though the recording is clear enough to hear everything.
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