Recording projects don`t get more ludicrous than this one, an attempt by a classical string quartet to play the music of Thelonious Monk.
Almost without exception, classically trained string players can`t swing, so the idea was doomed from the first. But arranger Tom Darter compounded the error by having the San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet attempt to play transcribed Monk solos as well.
The results would be laughable if they weren`t so artily pathetic. Yet there are other ways to do this; for on a mid-1950s album called ”An Image,” Bill Russo created some very effective string-quartet settings for alto saxophonist Lee Konitz–including a stunning version of Monk`s ”`Round Midnight”–by writing for strings in a way that didn`t require them to swing.
