The Turtle Island String Quartet has built a unique position in chamber music. They improvise as readily as they read from a score, and they are committed to bringing diverse musical traditions into dialogue with the classical quartet tradition. Throughout the album, these composers write their art-music passages with skill, but the strongest moments come when the quartet is set free to improvise. So fluent is their collective improvisation that on many tracks it is genuinely difficult to tell where the written score ends and the spontaneous invention begins.
Representing the tensions between different musical traditions, the title piece by Balakrishnan is aptly spirited, tuneful, and blues-inflected, with fiddle-style violin playing and ample…