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A String Quartet That Can Easily Morph into a Jazz Band

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On its Web site the Ebne Quartet has all the usual things, from a biography and a touring schedule to music clips and an estimable repertory list, as well as a link to The Other Ebne.

Click on it, and you will find recordings of the groups improvisations on jazz standards and a Bruce Springsteen song, and a YouTube clip showing this young Parisian string quartet tearing its way through Misirlou from Pulp Fiction.

The Ebne players had it both ways at their concert at Le Poisson Rouge on Wednesday evening. They began conventionally, with quartets by Haydn and Debussy, and then morphed into a jazz band for a handful of freewheeling improvisations that included the Pulp Fiction piece, Wayne Shorters Footprints, Miles Daviss All Blues and Chick Coreas Spain.

As an encore the four musicians stood together at the center of the stage and sang (in French) a richly harmonized version of Someday My Prince Will Come, and then dropped into their seats to give the tune a brief but zesty going over.

Not long ago musical fence-hopping of this kind was suspect, mostly because the performers who tried it were great in one style and abysmal in the other. This group seems entirely natural in both.

Its performance of Haydns Quartet in D (Op. 71, No. 2) was trim and precise, with an earthy texture in the fast movements and a graceful, velvety tone in the Adagio. Most of the current trends in late-18th- century performance are sidestepped but not ignored entirely. The quartet uses vibrato judiciously, and its fast movements, though brisk, gallop at a comfortable pace, not at the breathless speeds now in vogue.

These players pay careful attention to dynamic detail, and their account of the Haydn was nuanced and supple. Those qualities were magnified in the Debussy Quartet (Op. 10). This is one of this ensembles signature works at the moment: a passionate account opens its recent Virgin CD, which also includes the Ravel and Faur quartets.

After a short break the quartet returned for its jazz set, in which the cellist, Raphal Merlin, frequently played like a jazz bassist, with as much pizzicato as bowing, and plenty of bent notes. His solos and those of his colleagues Pierre Colombet and Gabriel Le Magadure, violinists, and Mathieu Herzog, violist were spirited and consistently inventive. It would be hard to say which version of the Ebne quartet is more pleasing; but then, you dont have to.

Ebne Quartet will play works by Mozart, Brahms and Ravel on Friday at Weill Recital Hall

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