For this engaging performance, Grammy-nominated PUBLIQuartet thoughtfully ponders “What is American?” through a musical kaleidoscope of composers and diverse genres that make up America’s rich musical history. The program includes works by Vijay Iyer and Rhiannon Giddens; the music of Ornette Coleman, Fats Waller, Tina Turner, Betty Davis, Alice Coltrane, and Ida Cox; and a reimagination of Dvořák’s American Quartet, in which the composer’s original melodies meet PUBLIQuartet’s blues, jazz, and rock-inflected stylings.

Publiquartet: What Is American

Wharton Center for Performing Arts

A new project pairing her incomparable piano mastery with string quartet featuring PUBLIQuartet. In the two decades since Hiromi released her stunning debut album Another Mind, the Japanese pianist/composer has blazed an incandescent trail across the jazz scene. Her fertile imagination and boundless creativity seem to ripple out of her as effortlessly as her virtuosic pianism. Equally impressive in acoustic or electric settings, she delves into a different kind of fusion on her latest project that encompasses and eclipses the boundaries of jazz, classical and pop, taking improvisation and composition to new heights of complexity and sophistication.

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Hiromi Quintet/PUBLIQuartet

Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center

Applauded by The Washington Post as “a perfect encapsulation of today’s trends in chamber music,” and by The New Yorker as “independent-minded,” multi-GRAMMY®-nominated PUBLIQuartet is an improvising string quartet whose repertoire blends genres and highlights American multiculturalism. The quartet’s latest album, the GRAMMY®-nominated What Is American, released in June 2022 on the Bright Shiny Things label, explores resonances between contemporary, blues, jazz, freely-improvised, and rock-inflected languages, all of which trace their roots back to the Black and Indigenous musical traditions that inspired Dvorak’s “American” String Quartet (Op. 96).

Harlem Quartet advances diversity in classical music while engaging new audiences with varied repertoire that includes works by minority composers. Their mission to share their passion with a wider audience has taken them around the world; from a 2009 performance at The White House for President Obama and First Lady, Michelle Obama, to a highly successful tour of South Africa in 2012, and numerous venues in between. The musically versatile ensemble has performed with such distinguished artists as Itzhak Perlman, Ida Kavafian, Carter Brey, Fred Sherry, Misha Dichter, Jeremy Denk, and Paquito D’Rivera. The quartet also collaborated with jazz masters Chick Corea and Gary Burton on the album Hot House, a 2013 multi-Grammy Award winning release.

Harlem Quartet and PUBLIQuartet

Baruch College

In its Chamber Music Pittsburgh debut, PUBLIQuartet presents What is American: Found Futures. With works by Henry Threadgill, George Lewis, Vijay Iyer, and members of PUBLIQuartet, interspersed with reinterpretations of music by Julia Perry, Duke Ellington, and Sun Ra, this concert envisions a future for American classical music rooted in a spirit of now-ness.

PUBLIQuartet

Mar 10, 2025

Publiquartet

Apr 25, 2024

Publiquartet: What Is American

Apr 21, 2024

Hiromi Quintet/PUBLIQuartet

PUBLIQuartet