01	Pannonia Boundless						06:12
	02	Cancao Verdes Anos						03:04
	03	Aaj Ki Raat						04:53
	04	La Muerta Chiquita						04:06
	05	Turceasca						07:31
	06	Gloomy Sunday						03:27
	07	Cortejo Funebre en el Monte Diablo						07:08
	08	Reponso						04:40
	09	Romance No. 1						04:07
	10	Gallop of a Thousand Horses						04:43
	11	Ecstacy						08:34
	12	Misirlou Twist						04:20

KRONOS QUARTET

KRONOS CARAVAN


ALL-PREMIERE RECORDING COLLECTS NEW MUSIC FROM PORTUGAL AND ARGENTINA, INDIA TO THE MIDDLE EAST, MEXICO AND THE UNITED STATES

COLLABORATIONS WITH RENOWNED MUSICIANS FROM AROUND THE WORLD IN DIVERSE REPERTOIRE UNIFIED BY ARRANGEMENTS OF OSVALDO GOLIJOV


Much of the color and variety that has infused the long career of Kronos Quartet is the result of collaborations with composers from more than 50 countries. Unquestionably the most globally minded ensemble of its kind, they are familiar with an astonishing number of musical traditions and master players. These explorations have resulted in some of their most striking projects, particularly "Pieces of Africa," which achieved the unprecedented distinction of being # 1 on the World and Classical charts simultaneously.

Kronos Caravan is inspired by that part of the world once known as "Pannonia"-the territory that connects northeastern Europe with the Mediterranean and the Orient. This crossroads of peoples and cultures is the starting point for a collection of arrangements and compositions that includes Portuguese fados, an Indian film theme, a Romanian Gypsy theme (featuring Taraf de Haidouks), tunes from Iran, Hungary, and the Arab world, and a ritual elegy by composer Terry Riley. Also included is a version of the Lebanese-derived Misirlou Twist by Richard Monsour (better known as Dick Dale), and a Mexican piece written originally for Cafe Tacuba.

The natural energy and verve that Kronos brings to this material is enhanced by an assortment of superior instrumentalists including Zakir Hussain, Ali Jihad Racy, Kayhan Kalhor, and others.

One unifying force that serves to bring some of these seemingly disparate musical elements together is the work of Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov, who arranged much of the material on this album. Golijov, who The New York Times describes as "a musical alchemist (who) conjures up new worlds," has enjoyed a longstanding relationship with Kronos, highlighted by recordings of two of his works for Nonesuch: K'vakarat (1994) for Night Prayers, and The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind (1995), released as a single in 1997.

Golijov's search for a meaningful integration of widely different musical sources has lead to work with a diverse group of performers. In commenting on Golijov's involvement with Kronos Caravan, David Harrington said, "Osvaldo Golijov has the remarkable ability to bring musicians together through his work:We needed a voice-a compositional voice-that provided coherence. I think he is the perfect collaborator in an idea like this because he instinctively understands the relationship between Terry Riley's piece and Misirlou Twist. He is Kronos' Gil Evans."

An upcoming concert tour, whose program is entitled Tonight Is the Night after the song by Indian composer Rahul Dev Berman, is a natural extension of the collaboration between Golijov and Kronos, expanded to include the soprano Dawn Upshaw. The program features several of the songs on Kronos Caravan, performed alongside new original works based on folk sources by Osvaldo Golijov and the Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, plus arrangements of traditional songs that span the globe from Europe, to Egypt and India, and to the Southern United States. The collaboration premieres in Iowa City 5/3, and is to be performed on the following dates:


May 3 Hancher Auditorium Iowa City, IA
May 7 Zellerbach Auditorium Berkeley, CA
May 9 Irvine Barclay Theater Irvine, CA
May 13 St. Ignatius Church New York, NY
May 25 Barbican Centre London, England
May 28 Prague Spring Festival Prague, Czech Republic





Kronos Caravan is the first Kronos release to feature the group's new cellist Jennifer Culp, who joined the group in 1999.

Kronos Quartet:

David Harrington, violin
John Sherba, violin
Hank Dutt, viola
Jennifer Culp, cello


RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2000
NONESUCH 79490







KRONOS QUARTET

KRONOS CARAVAN

Track Listing

1. Pannonia Boundless [Aleksandra Vrebalov]

2. Cancao Verdes Anos (Song of the Green Years) [Carlos Paredes]

3. Aaj Ki Raat (Tonight Is the Night) [Rahul Dev Burman]
Zakir Hussain, tabla

4. La Muerte Chiquita (The Little Death) [Enrique Rangel]

5. Turceasca (Turkish Song) [Sapo Perapaskero]
Taraf de Haidouks:
Anghel "Caliu" Gheorghe, violin
Constantin "Costica" Lautaru, violin
Ionel "Ionita" Manole, accordion
Marin "Marius" Manole, accordion
Cristinel Turturica, cymbalum
Viorel Vlad, double bass

6. Gloomy Sunday [Reszo Seress]

7. Cortejo Funebre en el Monte Diablo (Funeral March on Mount Diablo) [Terry Riley]

8. Responso (Responsory) [Anibal Troilo]

9. Romance No. 1 [Carlos Paredes]

10. Gallop of a Thousand Horses [Kayhan Kalhor]
Kayhan Kalhor, kamancheh
Ziya Tabassian, tombak

11. Ecstasy [Ali Jihad Racy]
Ali Jihad Racy, nay
Souhail Kaspar, tar

12. Misirlou Twist [Nicholas Roubanis]
Martyn Jones, drums

Tracks 2-6, 8, 9, 12 arranged by Osvaldo Golijov





KRONOS QUARTET

KRONOS CARAVAN


liner note by Ken Hunt


1. Pannonia Boundless

Aleksandra Vrebalov (b. 1970, Novi Sad, Yugoslavia)


The Pannonia of Aleksandra Vrebalov's title reminds us of the mutability of boundaries past and present. Pannonia was once a Roman province, before parts passed to the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, and the Soviets. The dawning of the twenty-first century saw its redrawn frontiers embracing Austria, Croatia, Slovenia, and Hungary. As Vrebalov explains, "Pannonia is a completely open and wide land of many crossroads that connects the Mediterranean with Northeast Europe and the Orient. There are no mountains or hills as far as the eye can see. It is a special, limitless place." Pannonia has been a symbolic and actual meeting place for peoples and cultures since before recorded history. Pannonia Boundless embodies the vigor of its composer's variegated culture and bears the stamp, in Vrebalov's words, of "tunes from Pannonian gypsy taverns."




2. Cancao Verdes Anos (Song of the Green Years)

Carlos Paredes (b. 1925, Coimbra, Portugal)


Carlos Paredes, who comes from a succession of master musicians, is what is known in idiomatic Portuguese as a casa-a "case," someone unique, someone who is his own man. He has judiciously extended the range, voice, and dynamics of his instrument, the guitarra portuguesa, taking it to new places, literally and figuratively. In turn, Argentinean-born composer Osvaldo Golijov, who arranged Cancao Verdes Anos and many other works on this recording, has transferred the signature sonorities of Paredes's Coimbra guitar-a larger, richer-voiced instrument than the so-called standard, twelve-string Lisbon model-to bowed instruments. Paredes's playing style captures the spirit of innovation while remaining steeped in the traditions of his Lusitanian homeland. This defining composition was originally heard in the Portuguese film Os Verdes Anos (The Green Years, 1963).




3. Aaj Ki Raat (Tonight Is the Night)

Rahul Dev Burman (b. 1939, birthplace unknown; d. 1994, Bombay, India)


Bollywood, as Bombay's film empire is known, outsells and out-sequins Hollywood on the most epic of scales. In 1931 the first Indian talkie broke the subcontinent's linguistic sound barrier with filmi (film song). By putting filmi on the lips of panting actors and pouting actresses, "music directors" such as S. D. Burman (1906-1975) and his son Rahul Dev Burman lured audiences who knew little or nothing of Hindi yet doted on music. These music directors created hits familiar to generations of cinema-goers all across the Indian subcontinent and throughout the Indian diaspora. This re-creation of a song from Anamika (1973), recorded with the Hindustani tabla master Zakir Hussain, merges tonight and every night as the "picture palace" lights dim and normal reality recedes.




4. La Muerte Chiquita (The Little Death)

Enrique Rangel (b. 1969, Minatitlan, Veracruz, Mexico)


Enrique "Quique" Rangel, bassist of the Mexican rock en espanol band Cafe Tacuba, wrote La Muerte Chiquita for Reves/YoSoy, the band's 1999 album. Two versions were recorded for this two-disc set: one by the band with vocals; the other by Kronos in Osvaldo Golijov's instrumental arrangement. Rangel's original Spanish lyrics touched on the fire of passion, the pain and paradise of love. Rangel's tale also spoke of the sweetness of revenge and perhaps slyly or darkly hinted at death of a more intimate kind-la petite mort-"la muerte chiquita" and "la muerte pequena" in the original lyrics. The song is like a modern-day corrido, as Mexico's distinguished song-story genre is known. Like any good story it can be picked up, refashioned and made personal to the storyteller.




5. Turceasca (Turkish Song)

Sapo Perapaskero (birthplace unknown, Clejani, Romania)


Turceasca is from the repertoire of the Romanian gypsy collective known as Taraf de Haidouks. Their name means "band of brigands." The group hails from Clejani to the southwest of the capital, Bucharest. For generations in ethnically diverse Romania, village ensembles such as Taraf de Haidouks have played an important role as carriers of musical traditions and as accompanists at rites of passage. Turceasca reflects both the pervasive influence of the Ottoman Empire on the non-purist musical repertory of the region and the adaptability of taraf ensembles-the very word is of Arab origin. As befits the leading practitioners of a tradition in motion, Taraf de Haidouks has proved a model of adaptability, since entering the western world during the Ceau_escu-tyrannized 1980s.




6. Szomoru Vasarnap (Gloomy Sunday)

Rezso Seress (b. 1899 birthplace unknown; d. 1968, place unknown)


Paul Robeson called Szomoru Vasarnap, also known as Gloomy Sunday, the "Hungarian suicide song." Since then many legends have been spun around both the song and Rezso Seress, its Hungarian composer, who took his own life in 1968. One translation opens with "Sunday is gloomy, my hours are slumberless/ Dearest, the shadows I live with are numberless/ Little white flowers will never awaken you/ Not where the black coach of sorrow has taken you." Yet in the final, frequently glossed-over verse, the author of Gloomy Sunday snaps out of this spell of despair and hopes his bad dream has not disturbed his lover. Many connected with the morbidly despondent lyrics only too well, however: they chose oblivion in the Danube-the river that once marked the northern and eastern boundaries of Pannonia-leaving a rose and Seress's song as a suicide note.




7. Cortejo Funebre en el Monte Diablo (Funeral March on Mount Diablo)

Terry Riley (b. 1935, Colfax, California)


The Mount Diablo of Terry Riley's title refers to one of the San Francisco Bay Area's best-known vantage and beauty spots. Riley writes, "Requiem for Adam was composed in memory of Adam Harrington, son of David and Regan Harrington. I knew Adam since he was a small child, and was with him the day before his sudden death at the age of sixteen. The title of Cortejo Funebre en el Monte Diablo alludes to the actual spot where Adam left his physical form on Easter Sunday. In this piece Kronos is joined by a powerful electronic percussion soundtrack of horns, bells, electronic percussion, and gongs to help establish the ritual feeling of a procession slowly moving on a ridge atop the mountain. This is funeral music more in the tradition of New Orleans Dixieland, with an offbeat Dies Irae theme in canonic variation to accompany the quirky horns found on the soundtrack."




8. Responso (Responsory)

Anibal Troilo (b. 1914, Buenos Aires, Argentina; d. 1975, Buenos Aires)


Spare a thought for Heinrich Band, the German inventor of a jumbo-sized button accordion called the bandonion. As the "poor man's piano" it catalyzed a working-class movement known as the Bandonionvereine (bandonion associations) in the land of its birth, especially in Germany's heavy industrial heartland. Concurrently, in Buenos Aires the instrument took on a new life, name, and identity. In the hands of the tango maestro Anibal Troilo, the bandoneon was poignantly united with religiosity. Responso, Troilo's memorializing composition for the lyricist Homero Manzi, is a prayer for the dead-the responsory in the Roman Catholic funeral mass. Spare a thought for Band, Troilo, Manzi, and the apocryphal English seaman said to have bequeathed the first bandoneon to Buenos Aires in final settlement of his whorehouse bill, thereby planting the seeds of a new musical sensation.




9. Romance No. 1

Carlos Paredes (b. 1925, Coimbra, Portugal)


Through Carlos Paredes's hometown of Coimbra runs the River Mondego, also known by its more evocative name, O Rio dos Poetas. The River of Poets has inspired generations of Portuguese artists, writers, and musicians. In the early nineteenth century August Hilario, the day's foremost exponent of fado de Coimbra, stamped Coimbra's mournfully romantic style of fado (literally, "fate") on Portugal's musical map. Paredes taps into this style of fado, which is full of saudade, a uniquely Portuguese word that signifies both longing and the joys of woe. Romance No. 1 is marbled with a bittersweet, elegiac quality, at times bordering on pathos.




10. Gallop of a Thousand Horses

Kayhan Kalhor (b. 1963, Tehran, Iran)


The kamancheh-literally a "little arc" (and here Iranians will often trace a finger over an eyebrow to illustrate its derivation)-is an instrument that figures in many of the folk and art music traditions of the lands bordering Kayhan Kalhor's Iranian homeland. This spike fiddle, deftly pivoted so its strings meet the bow, is also found, usually under other names, in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Georgia, and Turkey. Kalhor, who now lives in New York, plays the kamancheh part with Ziya Tabassian accompanying on the tombak (goblet drum). Of Gallop of a Thousand Horses, its composer writes, "This piece is influenced by Turkoman folk melodies which are intrinsically linked to nature, especially horses. I have tried to evoke a feeling of horses roaming freely."




11. Ecstasy

Ali Jihad Racy (b. 1943, Ibl-al-Saqi, Lebanon)


The Lebanese-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Ali Jihad Racy placed Ecstasy-here used in its Sufi sense of ecstatic communication with the Beloved and in its experiential sense-as the middle section of a suite representing "an integration of European polyphony and Near Eastern sonorities and modal techniques." By employing the sounds of Lebanese instruments and by stipulating the strings be tuned scordatura fashion (a non-standard tuning used to deliver a specific effect), Racy conjures a sinuous, almost visual portrait. After an extended introduction by the cello, nuanced with the inflections of Near Eastern pitch bends and vibrato fluctuations, pizzicato pluckings herald the arrival of a steady pulse played on Souhail Kaspar's tar (frame-drum). The composer then fills the air with his nay, the rim-blown reed-flute of the poet Rumi, a sound so characteristic and defining of Arab art music.




12. Misirlou Twist

Nicholas Roubanis (birth date and place unknown)


Richard Monsour, better known as Dick Dale, confused plenty of people with inconsistencies about birthplaces in Boston and Beirut. Better documented is his West Coast incarnation as "the King of the Surf Guitar," a guitar style said to be colored by Armenian music. Dale never pretended to have written Misirlou-it appeared in sheet music form credited to Nicholas Roubanis in the 1930s-but in his hands a curious assemblage of European, Middle Eastern, and West Coast musical hooks and baits caught the public's attention, especially in California. Here Kronos is joined on drums by Martyn Jones, founding member of the Mermen, a San Francisco-based surf rock band.