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Turtle Island Quartet Has Blended Jazz and Strings for Nearly Quarter of a Century

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Turtle Island Quartet
David Balakrishnan took a leap. Some might call it brave, others dumb luck.

Either way, now he looks brilliant.

For nearly a quarter century, Balakrishnan has taken two beloved forms of music — string quartets and jazz— and mashed them into something that is both reverential and ground breaking.

Since founding the Turtle Island Quartet in 1985, Balakrishnan has led the group on a wild ride of cross-genre mutation that has spawned 14 albums and garnered two Grammy Awards. The most recent Grammy came in 2008 for the album “A Love Supreme: The Legacy of John Coltrane.” Turtle Island will perform that work at 6 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. tonight and Thursday at the Naples Philharmonic Center for the Arts.

But that success hasn’t come easy. It took a while for the group’s core audience — string quartet enthusiasts — to embrace such a radical departure from classical traditions. “The string quartet is considered one of the purest forms of music,” Balakrishnan says. “It’s a test of what a great composer can do.”

Looking at the list of those who mastered it — Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven — you can understand the devotion to the form.

Jazz too, especially the artists Turtle Island interprets, has grown to hold a similar revered spot in the musical cannon. Artists such as Coltrane, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk have been elevated to near deity status.

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