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Crowdambo at Yoshi's

Jeff Kaliss on April 19, 2010
Quartet San Francisco

Take a closer listen, and you’ll realize that the Crowden School in Berkeley isn’t the limited classical academy that you might imagine it to be. For several years, violinist Jeremy Cohen has served as a guest coach at the school, inspiring students to serve up the sort of zesty mix of classical and jazz genres that gained Cohen’s Quartet San Francisco a Grammy nomination this year for Best Classical Crossover Album. (QSF Plays Brubeck, on the Violinjazz Recordings label, was also nominated as Best Engineered Album, Classical.)

Under the influence of visitors like Cohen, the Crowden kids “don’t necessarily compose in a classical idiom,” notes the school’s PR person, Jen Strauss. As for how eclectically they can play, you’ll hear it for yourself when the QSF hosts a benefit for the school on May 3 at Yoshi’s, the prime jazz venue in Jack London Square in Oakland. Crowden students and alumni will collaborate on several cross-genre pieces, including Cohen’s own Crowdambo, a mambo he dedicated to Anne Crowden, the school’s late founder and Cohen’s early teacher and inspiration. (See video.)

Listen to the Music

The program also includes arrangements, mostly by Cohen and Crowden faculty member and fellow violinist Eugene Chukhlov, of Beatles songs (watch a recent performance); jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli’s Hold That Tiger; La Bella Cubana (a habanera by turn-of-the-century Cuban composer José White Lafitte); and the music of 89-year-old jazz legend and former Mills College student Dave Brubeck, who earlier this month praised the QSF as “a wonderful quartet ... that really brings this off well.”

Several of these pieces were presented by the QSF and the Crowden students last month to a delighted assembly of conventioneers of the American String Teachers Association, in Santa Clara. The Yoshi’s concert will not only help bolster Crowden’s coffers but also give your own kids a chance to witness their peers in a context of skilled entertainment. Contact Yoshi’s or the Crowden School quickly, though; the benefit sold out last year.