Photograph by Blair Gable

Last month Joel Quarrington won a Juno award, in the category of Classical Album of the Year: Solo or Chamber Ensemble. A few days later Quarrington’s colleagues in Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Orchestra threw a surprise reception for him. There were speeches and cake.

Quarrington is the orchestra’s principal double bassist. Partly because his instrument is normally viewed as lumbering and ungainly, he didn’t get excited when Garden Scene, his latest album of virtuoso bass pieces with piano accompaniment, was nominated for a Juno. Violinists usually win that sort of thing. “It’s not in my nature that I would have ever gone to that event,” Quarrington said.

But then he won, and now people congratulate him everywhere he goes. The people who seem happiest are his fellow bassists. This is because Quarrington, a big 55-year-old with curly hair and a goofy grin, is considered by his peers to be among the finest bassists anywhere. And also because he is a bit of a revolutionary on the instrument.

Most bassists tune their instrument so its four open strings are separated by intervals of a fourth, from low E to A to D to G. This makes their lives hell, because every other string instrument in the orchestra tunes in fifths. The basses spend a lot of time matching what the cellos do, only an octave lower. But since the cellos tune their strings from a low C to G to D to A, the bass can’t follow the cellos down to those lowest notes. And because tuning is more art than science, the basses constantly have to make little adjustments to fit the pitch the other string instruments produce. Nobody ever thinks about this but bassists, and it’s no fun.

That low C is the big problem. European bassists add a fifth string to get down there. North American bassists typically add an extension, a few extra inches of neck that poke up from the top of the fingerboard. They flick a mechanical lever to activate the extension when they have to go down below E. It’s a pain.

One week in 1987, Quarrington needed to play some Bach, which required he move quickly in and out of the bottom register. He had no time to flick an extension on and off. He loosened his low E string until it could reach down to the C, then he tuned the other three strings in fifths to even the other notes out. He thought he’d settled a technical problem. What surprised him was how much easier it was to match the other instruments’ tuning. But the strangest thing was how much clearer and more sonorous everything that came out of his bass was. This has something to do with overtones. Quarrington has never looked back.

He is not the only bassist who plays in fifths but he may be the most prominent. His attitude is contagious. Marjolaine Fournier, who sits next to him in the NAC Orchestra, switched to fifths two years ago. The extra overtones make her instrument more resonant too. “I used to have a really good bass,” she said. “Now I have a fantastic bass.”

Callum Jennings is one of Quarrington’s bass students at McGill University. He switched to fifths over the Christmas break. Would he go back? “No way.” A bass tuned in fourths “feels like it’s broken.”

Lately Quarrington has been playing frequent guest stints in the London Symphony Orchestra. “I really wanted to see what it was like to play with a bona fide great orchestra. I went into it thinking I’d spend a week finding out, and that would be the end of it. But it was too exciting.” Now he juggles life in Ottawa with his escapes to the U.K.

In an ordinary year Quarrington would have been no likelier to try out for the LSO than to show up at the Junos. This is no ordinary year. In January his older brother, the novelist Paul Quarrington, died of lung cancer. “He and I were really close. We’d often talked about doing different projects together. Going to Ireland together, doing a fishing trip. You don’t realize how many things you put on hold. You say, ‘Well, I’ll get to that.’ ”

Paul Quarrington responded to his cancer diagnosis by speeding up instead of slowing down. “It was a good lesson,” Joel Quarrington says. “Don’t put anything on hold.” The two travelled to Nashville to record strings for an upcoming album of Paul Quarrington’s songs. They were working on the album until three days before Paul died.

Since then, Joel Quarrington says, “I’ve actually done a whole mess of things I didn’t feel like doing.” The result has been a mid-career renaissance.

But what’s most interesting is the way he’s adopted an unusual method for tuning his bass, at intervals of a fifth instead of a fourth. This turns out to have effects on the instrument that would have been hard to predict, so while I was interviewing Quarrington I shot some video. This’ll help readers see, hear and understand what I’m trying to describe. So here’s Joel Quarrington:

]]> http://joelquarrington.com/video-joel-quarrington%e2%80%99s-bass-revolution.html/feed 0 http://joelquarrington.com/a-juno-for-naco-bassist-quarrington.html#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://joelquarrington.com/a-juno-for-naco-bassist-quarrington.html#comments Wed, 21 Apr 2010 01:26:00 +0000 joel http://joelquarrington.com/?p=330 Ottawa double bassist Joel Quarrington won a 2010 Juno Award in St. John’s on Saturday for his CD Garden Scene.

Quarrington, the principal double bassist of the National Arts Centre Orchestra, won in the category of Classical Album of the Year: Solo or Chamber Ensemble.

Quarrington’s CD on the Analekta label, also featuring pianist Andrew Burashko, includes pieces by Korngold, Bottesini, Gliere and others.

Born in Toronto, Quarrington began playing the double bass at age 11 and studied in Toronto, Rome, Vienna and Prague.

Other nominees in the category included violinist Angèle Dubeau & La Pietà, I Musici de Montréal and violinist James Ehnes and Ottawa harpist Caroline Léonardelli.

Léonardelli was nominated for her CD El Dorado, for the Centaur Classics label. Quarrington was also featured as a guest performer on Léonardelli’s CD.

© Copyright 2010

Those lucky enough to have been in the Kirkpatrick Theatre at the 2007 convention at Oklahoma City University to hear Joel’s ISB debut caught one of the highlights of that week, and for many one of the most impressive double bass recitals ever to grace a convention. This studio CD contains that whole program, including the encore, and the recording captures everything that made that evening so memorable.

The Erich Korngold Garden Scene from which the CD takes its title is from a set of pieces for violin and piano that the composer himself arranged from his 1920 incidental music to Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing.  It is a very beautiful work, and the breadth of tone and color with which Quarrington imbues this recording is exceptional.  His vibrato is expressive nnd highly varied, and convincingly conjures the scene in Leonato’s garden fiom the beginning of Act Three. Quarrington utilizes a remarkably wide spectrum of colors in this five and a half minute work and is amply matched by the sensitive accompanying of Andrew Burashko.

The performance of Bottesini’s D major Elegy is gorgeous; a lesson in rubato, Quarrington skillfully threads each phrase with nuance and an ardent delivery worthy of Di Stefano.  The popular J.C. Bach/Henri Casadesus Concerto in C minor again demonstrates an exceptional sense of gradation and shading.  Technically flawless, the articulation as varied as it is clear; the slow movement is an exceptionally beautiful performance.  If one spends a moment to ponder the audacity of the Casadesus family in attributing works of their own composition to J.C. Bach, Mozart, and Handel among others, it is worth remembering that Edouard Nanny was also a member of their ‘la Societe de concerts des Instruments anciens’ for a number of years and may well have been the catalyst for his ‘discovery’ of one of our most popular Concerti.

Gliere’s Four Pieces are justifiably among the most popular concert works for the bass today and these recordings are among the finest of this repertoire on record.  Quarrington and Burashko both sparkle in the Scherzo and make the Tarantella sound effortless while ably recalling the frenzied Italian dance.  The ensemble is impeccable throughout and every detail is evident in the recording – kudos to producer Roberto Occhipinti.

Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Sonata for Solo Contrabass, which concludes this CD, is a terrific recent addition to the concert repertoire for our instrument.  The influence of Shostakovich is hard to ignore; the third movement certainly recalls ‘A Soldier’s Tale’ to some degree and while the angular and rhythmic propulsion of much of the material has echoes in countless works, the long melodic lines, especially in the lower registers, sound unique and remarkably well written for the instrument.  It is an engaging and compelling work.

This is an exceptional disc in every way, and a very welcome release of some classic and some unknown material.  I am fervently hoping that Joel’s recital from the 2009 convention likewise makes it to disc in the very near future.

-  Review by Robert Nairn in Volume 33, Number 2 of Bass World

In any case one is hardly likely to argue given the instrumental finesse displayed by master bassist Joel Quarrington. He and Andrew Burashko have constructed a convincing recital. It opens with the warmly quiescent charms of the Korngold of the disc’s title, moves on to a maestro of the bass repertoire, the great Bottesini, and then presents a centre-piece concerto in piano-reduced form. This is the notorious and amusing forgery perpetrated by Henri Casadesus whose ‘J.C. Bach’ work did the rounds as a Viola Concerto for many, many years. William Primrose recorded it in that form. It’s given suitably Old School treatment in this bass-and-piano version. Glière provides some lyric and dance relief, before we plunge into the formal strictures of the Weinberg Sonata that ends the disc.

The Garden Scene derives from Korngold’s Much Ado About Nothing. The burnished legato that Quarrington produces, his equalized scale and tonal subtlety – also the cellistic lightness he brings to it – begins the disc admirably. Bottesini only contributes the brief Elegy but it’s notable for what the performers do with it: variegated shading and nuance, precise articulation, and a bel canto imperative. The bassist displays prodigious feats of articulation, clarity and projection in the Casadesus-Bach where the lyricism in the slow movement is a focal point. Listen to the dynamics around the 4:25 mark in this movement to appreciate the full expressive potential of the big bull fiddle. There’s virtuosity galore in the finale, not least in the cadenza.

The quartet of Glière morceaux derives from Opp. 9 and 32, written in the first decade of the twentieth century. The Praeludium is serious and lyrical whilst its opus mate Scherzo is commensurately jolly, but with a wistful B section. The Op.32 Tarantella is a fizzer, with an especially lovely second theme cantilena, and must have been an especially fine showpiece for Koussevitzky, who was the dedicatee of both sets. The notes don’t say much about Weinberg’s sonata. It was ‘prepared from a manuscript facsimile that was edited by the great bass virtuoso Rodion Azarkhin.’ The work dates from 1971 but was clearly never published during the composer’s lifetime. It’s in six concise movements. The opening is restless and unsettled, the first Allegretto mordant, the second an embodiment of a question mark in music (very uneasy), the Lento tense, and the final decidedly Shostakovich-imbued.

Lovers of the bass will find Quarrington on top form in this well recorded and intriguingly laid-out recital, and Burashko’s perceptive qualities ensure solid ensemble virtues.

Read more at MusicWeb

Click below for a sample track from the new CD!

01-Korngold-Garden-Scene.mp3

I am really happy to announce the September 22nd release of my newest and  BEST! recording to date from the Analekta record company of Montreal, “Garden Scene”.

This recital program is the one I prepared for the 2007 International Society of Bassists Convention in Oklahoma City. After that very successful recital I was very honoured and flattered to be invited to play all over the world! I took the same program to Copenhagen, Vienna, Beijing as well as right here at the International Chamber Music Festival in Ottawa.

For the actual recording of “Garden Scene”, I had the very good fortune to work with my life long colleague and friend Roberto Occhipinti who acted as the producer and editor. Roberto is probably best known for his work in jazz although he did start out as a classical player and in fact was formerly the Principal Bassist of the Canadian Opera Company. He has played and recorded extensively with Cuban expatriate jazz pianist Hilario Durán and Jane Bunnett, he has his own R&B band, “Soul Stew”, and has toured with many others like the “Gorillaz”; in more recent years he has been the producer for classical artists such as the True North Brass, Quartetto Gelatto, the Gryphon Trio, the St. Lawrence Quartet and Via Salzburg. His many awards include National Jazz Awards, Junos, as well as a Socan award he received for his soundtrack for the cartoon series, “George Shrinks”.

As the recording process unfolded, Roberto showed me though was how truly fantastic his ears are! He obviously knows how to record a bass (his answer; 10 microphones) and many who have heard “Garden Scene” have commented that it is probably the best recorded bass sound they have heard. I like to point out that despite my many attempts at helping him edit the cd, he ignored me completely and did it by himself, and by ear alone, that is to say, with no music scores!

I would encourage those interested to check out Roberto’s website, http://www.robertoocchipinti.com to see and hear his many excellent recordings and compositions.

I am also quite pleased about the repertoire on this cd; My transcriptions of the Korngold “Garden Scene” as well as the complete J.C. Bach “Concerto in G minor” (originally c minor for viola) are included as well as the world premiere recording of the very important “Solo Sonata” by Mieczyslaw Weinberg whose close friend and mentor was Shostakovich. I feel this is a very important original work for bass that should be a staple of our 20th century repertoire.

My longtime accompanist, Andrew Burashko and I round out the program with the “Four Pieces” by Gliere which I think sound really great and my old favourite the Bottesini “Elegy”. After all this time it was wonderful to re-record that work and I find our performance to be so much better than our original Naxos recording in every way.

The largest classical record company in Canada “Analekta” purchased our recording and took over all the production concerns and distribution which I couldn’t be happier about.

The recording is available from itunes, Amazon and others, or else directly from Analekta itself (Click links below).  It is not available until after September 22nd release though!

]]> http://joelquarrington.com/garden-scene-on-analekta.html/feed 0 http://joelquarrington.com/podcasts.html#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://joelquarrington.com/podcasts.html#comments Sat, 05 Sep 2009 19:32:23 +0000 joel http://joelquarrington.com/newWPsite/?p=87

Double Bass Blog!

I was delighted to be a podcast guest of Jason Heath’s on his “Contrabass Conversations” which has just been released this Saturday September 5th.

http://doublebassblog.org/

Jason does a fantastic job with his podcast and website and I am really honoured to have been his guest.

Double Bass Podcast!

For those of you who enjoy a somewhat raunchier podcast, I had great fun last summer with Peter Jones of the “Doublebass Cast”.

http://doublebasscast.com/

Peter does his podcast from his home in Tenerife, the Canary Islands (Spain) where he has been the Principal Bass for the last twenty five years. Peter is truly a seasoned professional and we shared many common experiences and concerns about bass playing and life in general with regards to orchestra playing, teaching and a whole slew of other fun topics.

We did a six hour Skype session and began the drinks at around the 2:30 mark so things got more and more interesting as we went along!

(I apologize for the foul language and would suggest parental guidance.)

My friend Jack Schackner, took some footage from my recital at the 2009 Penn State convention of the ISB and I so I posted some.

I have a few other video things I could post, and as soon as I figure out how, I probably will!