Music from Afghanistan, Ethiopia, & Iraq

"For every person, his country is very dear. Everything about Afghanistan — its dust, its weather, its people — I miss all of it. When I have my instrument next to me, I feel the scent of my country."

—Homayoun Sakhi

Come join us on August 1 & 2 for Music Without Borders, a full weekend of music and events at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, CA! YBCA's Bay Area Now 5 festival features two Kronos performances, including a special collaboration on August 2 with Homayoun Sakhi, one of the finest Afghan musicians of his generation . The weekend also includes two film screenings and a listening party with David Harrington.

The performance on Friday, August 1 at 8 pm features music from Azerbaijan, Turkey, Iran, India, and Kazakhstan. Three new instruments, one of them based on the Ethiopian begena (shown above), were designed and built for the Kronos Quartet by Bay Area sound artist Walter Kitundu. (View photos of the instruments on MySpace or Facebook.)

On Saturday night, special guest Homayoun Sakhi joins Kronos in the world premiere of Rangin Kaman (The Rainbow), co-commissioned by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and YBCA. Sakhi, formerly of Kabul, Afghanistan and currently residing in Fremont, CA, counts among the world's best players of the Afghan rubâb, a double-chambered lute.

The weekend also includes two films — Half Moon and Breaking the Silence: Music in Afghanistan — dealing with what it means to be a musician in Iran and Afghanistan, a listening party with David Harrington, and more.

Learn more about Music Without Borders & purchase tickets here.

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Keeril Makan - In Sound

Kronos appears on Keeril Makan's debut album In Sound, available in stores now. Throughout the album, Makan explores the connections between noise, sound, and emotion while exploring his Indian and Jewish musical roots. Kronos is ..featured on both The Noise Between Thoughts, an electronic sound world evoked through purely acoustic means, and Washed By Fire, an examination of cultural identity.

Makan draws from the diverse worlds of American folk music, European avant-garde, Indian classical music, and minimalism. Evident throughout the album is the continuum between noise and purity of sound. According to Makan, in these works there is no formal logic other than careful attunement to what the ear and body dictate.

Learn more and purchase Keeril Makan's In Sound here.

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KQ + BBQ at Rancho Nicasio!

How often do you get a chance to lounge on a lawn and eat barbecue while listening to Kronos?

Kronos performs this Sunday afternoon at 4 PM at Rancho Nicasio in Marin County, and we'd love for you to join us! Rancho Nicasio, known for its fantastic barbecue, is a classic bar and restaurant located amidst the rolling hills of West Marin County. Kronos always has a wonderful time performing at Rancho Nicasio, and we'd love you to join us at this year's concert.

The program features a wide variety of music, including pieces by Clint Mansell (of Requiem for a Dream fame), Hamza El Din's Escalay (Waterwheel), featured on our best-selling album Pieces of Africa, and an arrangement of Thelonious Monk's 'Round Midnight.

Kronos goes on at 4 PM this Sunday, July 27. Tickets are still available: $25 each, with food available to purchase. To order tickets, please call Rancho Nicasio at 415.662.2219.

Rancho Nicasio is located at 1 Old Rancheria Road, Nicasio, CA 94946. Detailed directions to Rancho Nicasio can be found at their website: http://www.ranchonicasio.com.

We hope to see you there!

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Kronos Quartet - 2008 Summer Tour

We're excited to announce our summer tour dates! Kronos performs all over North America this summer, so visit our website or MySpace page and see if we'll be playing near you.

A few of the highlights:

Our summer began yesterday in Toronto, where the group was joined by Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq for two performances of Nunavut at the Luminato Festival on June 12 and June 13.

As part of Bay Area Now 5, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts presents Music Without Borders on August 1 and 2 in San Francisco. Homayoun Sakhi, one of the world's finest players of the rubâb, a lute-like instrument used in Afghan music, joins Kronos on August 2.

Kronos will be playing several of your favorite festivals this summer as well, including Tanglewood Festival on August 14 and Ravinia Festival (with Glenn Kotche of Wilco) on September 3.

Visit our website or MySpace page for more information and a complete list of summer tour dates!

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New Album: The Cusp of Magic by Terry Riley

"One day I was talking with [Terry] and he said he wanted [his next] piece to be 'magical.' My granddaughter Emily was an infant at the time. We had little toys and noisemakers around the house, which we would play as I carried her around. Of all the experiences I've had, that is the most magical. 'Why don't you just come over, and we'll play some of Emily's toys?' I said."

-- David Harrington
Artistic Director, Kronos Quartet

This is was the spark that led to The Cusp of Magic by Terry Riley, now available on Nonesuch Records. Commissioned for Kronos on the occasion of our longtime friend and collaborator Terry Riley's 70th birthday, the piece features Kronos joined by Wu Man on pipa (a Chinese plucked string instrument, similar to a lute), with all musicians also playing a variety of percussion instruments, toys, and noisemakers.

David Harrington adds that "no composer has been as much a part of Kronos as Terry Riley. We first met at Mills College in 1978, and he has written 23 works for us so far." Kronos premiered The Cusp of Magic in 2005, and the piece was performed at Carnegie Hall as part of Kronos' 2006 Live Mix series. The Cusp of Magic will be performed on February 17 at Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at University of Maryland, College Park.

Listen to excerpts of Terry Riley's The Cusp of Magic on our website. Click here to purchase The Cusp of Magic via our website or iTunes.

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Kronos Featured on Nine Inch Nails’ Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D

On November 20th Interscope Records released Nine Inch Nails' Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D (Year Zero Remixed), featuring the Kronos Quartet and Enrique Gonzalez Müller's remix of Another Version of the Truth.

Spun off from Year Zero, the 2-charting album issued last spring, Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D includes a diverse array of remixers, from Joy Division and New Order's Stephen Morris to hip-hop poet Saul Williams; from avant-garde leader Bill Laswell, electronica's Olof Dreijer from The Knife, Interpol drummer Sam Fogarino and post-punk revivalists The Faint to an unknown fan who submitted a remix via the Internet.

"I'm very pleased with the way it turned out," says Trent Reznor. "I reached out to heroes, friends and strangers....I encouraged those I approached to do anything and insert themselves as much as possible into the track. It's always interesting for me to hear my work reinterpreted -- I hope it is for you as well."

Fans can even reinterpret and remix Year Zero themselves. The CD package for Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D includes a DVD-ROM containing every track from Year Zero in multi-track format, ready to be remixed, and a special Web site, remix.nin.com, features fan remixes. Says Reznor, "Remixes and fun encouraged."

Listen to Kronos & Enrique Gonzalez Müller's remix of Another Version of the Truth on our website, Facebook, and MySpace. Purchase the album on Amazon and iTunes.

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Be a Kronos fan on Facebook!

Be a Kronos fan on Facebook! We've put up a bunch of live & unreleased tracks that aren't available anywhere else on our new Facebook player. You can also listen to Another Version of the Truth, Kronos' contribution to the just-released Nine Inch Nails remix album.

Plus there's live concert footage of Kronos' performance from last month with Tom Waits at the 21st Annual Bridge School Benefit, which Rolling Stone called "the undisputed highlight of the concert." It was an amazing night, and we had photographer Zoran Orlic on hand behind the scenes to document the show.

Come to www.facebook.com/kronosquartet and click on "Become a fan"!

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Kronos performs w/Glenn Kotche!

Kronos is thrilled to be performing with composer and percussionist Glenn Kotche -- a.k.a. the Grammy-winning band Wilco's drummer -- at the SFJAZZ Festival in San Francisco this week! His new piece for string quartet and drum kit, titled Anomaly, was commissioned by SFJAZZ and will receive its world premiere performance at Herbst Theater on October 25 and 26.

After hearing Kotche's album Mobile, which included elements of Balinese storytelling, Reich-influenced minimalism, and insect sounds, David Harrington of Kronos asked him to write something for Kronos. Composing the piece while on tour with Wilco, Kotche has Kronos exploring new sonic territory -- including bowing and ringing handbells. "Some parts are beautiful," Kotche says, "things I couldn't play on drums. That's the way I treated the whole thing: four players in the quartet. I have each player to act like a limb to explore rhythmic ideas. If I could have a violin be my right hand and a cello be my left foot, what would it sound like?" Kotche, heralded by the Chicago Tribune for his "unfailing taste, technique and discipline," will share the stage with Kronos at these performances.

Also joining Kronos at the SFJAZZ festival will be instrument builder and sound artist Walter Kitundu, whose Cerulean Sweet III honors jazz great Charles Mingus through the use of snippets of his piano improvisations on vinyl played by Kronos and Kitundu on phonoharps, the instruments created by Kitundu for this piece. The concert will also feature the US premiere of Sinawi by Bay Area performance artist Dohee Lee, who will join Kronos on stage for these shows, a new arrangement of Thelonious Monk's 'Round Midnight by Randall Woolf, music by cartoon music master Raymond Scott and cartoon music-influenced John Zorn, and a rare performance of Kronos's legendary version of Television's Marquee Moon. Don't miss it!

To learn more and purchase tickets, visit SFJAZZ's website.

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New iTunes Release: Kronos Quartet Plays Sigur Rós

On September 4, Nonesuch Records released Kronos Quartet Plays Sigur Rós exclusively on iTunes. The two pieces included on this download-only release have both been staples of Kronos' live concerts for several years, but have never been available for purchase: an arrangement of Icelandic experimental rock group Sigur Rós' Flugufrelsarinn and a Jimi Hendrix-inspired version of The Star-Spangled Banner. Stop by our MySpace page to listen to Flugufrelsarinn.

"I first heard Sigur Rós in 2000 and it was thrilling," said David Harrington, Kronos founder and artistic director. "I could not stop listening to them. Kronos had to play their music. Sigur Rós create entire universes with their sound: imaginary places populated by desires and colors and feelings that belong solely to the fleetingly understood realm of music."

In 2002 Kronos commissioned an arrangement of Flugufrelsarinn from the Ágætis Byrjun album. In its original, sung version, Flugufrelsarinn relates a parable of salvation and sacrifice, in which an unnamed narrator tries to rescue helpless flies in a lake from the jaws of the approaching salmon. In Stephen Prutsman's arrangement for Kronos, the work takes on a new delicateness while losing none of its essential mystery.

The Quartet has been playing its Prutsman/Kronos version of The Star-Spangled Banner — inspired by Jimi Hendrix's famous Woodstock interpretation — in concert since 2003. The Los Angeles Times called a recent performance of the piece, "a fiery political protest that recalled (Kronos') roots."

Click here to purchase Kronos Quartet Plays Sigur Rós, and listen to Flugufrelsarinn on MySpace.

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Two New Kronos Albums - Tom Waits & Osvaldo Golijov

Healing the Divide: Tom Waits + Kronos

In September 2003, Kronos teamed up with Tom Waits for a concert at Lincoln Center in New York to benefit the humanitarian organization Healing the Divide, and a live recording of the performance was released on July 10th. The full album, Healing the Divide: A Concert for Peace and Reconciliation, features the single Diamond In Your Mind and three additional Waits & Kronos tracks - Way Down in the Hole, God's Away on Business, and Lost in the Harbor. Other performers that night included Philip Glass, Anoushka Shankar, and Foday Musa Suso.

The concert featuring this rare collaboration between Kronos and Waits, with bassist Greg Cohen, was the culmination of a 20-day U.S. tour by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. About his participation in the event, Waits said (in his inimitable style), "I'm no fool. It's a spiritual insurance policy. Hell, at my age, the next group I put together, everyone may be playing a harp. All kidding aside, I owed His Holiness a favor. He did all my papers in school."

Proceeds from the sales of the album will benefit Healing the Divide (a non-profit organization formed by Richard Gere in 2001 to generate innovative appraches to solving humanitarian crises) and its Tibetan Health Initiative, which provides health insurance to Buddhist monks and nuns.

Healing the Divide: A Concert for Peace and Reconciliation is available on iTunes, Amazon.com, and eMusic. Listen to Diamond In Your Mind on Myspace.

Osvaldo Golijov: Oceana

Kronos is also featured on Oceana, a collection of three major works by composer Osvaldo Golijov. The album was also released this Tuesday, on Deutsche Grammophon, and features Kronos' performance of Tenebrae, a two-movement work for string quartet. In addition to Tenebrae, the album includes Golijov's Oceana performed by Brazilian vocalist Luciana Souza and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, and Three Songs, performed by soprano Dawn Upshaw and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, both conducted by Robert Spano.

"I wrote [Tenebrae]," Golijov says, "as a consequence of witnessing two contrasting realities in a short period of time in September 2000. I was in Israel at the start of a new wave of violence...and a week later I took my son to the new planetarium in New York where we could see the Earth as a beautiful blue dot in space. I wanted to write a piece that could be listened to from different perspectives." The meditative work in two movements "is about pain," says Golijov, "but pain seen from inside and from a distance."

Oceana is available on iTunes and Amazon.com. Listen to excerpts and learn more about the album here.

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