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The first Jeff Quartet is from Gabriel Jackson. At first it may seem an odd choice for a memorial piece - a poem from a Latvian poet that answers a poem by Beat poet Alan Ginsberg, which itself addresses Walt Whitman and Garcia Lorca. But the poem is immensely literary, like Jeff, and, Ieva Lesinska's translation brilliantly captures poet Kārlis Vērdins reverence of those artists who came before him. In fact, the supermarket boy immortalized by Ginberg in his famed poem "A Supermarket in California," in his observations of the commercialized world in which he lives, ramps up Ginsberg's dismay to a cultured - and at times comic - cynicism.
Jeff would have approved and related.
Of course, Gabriel's unique compositional voice tightens the screws on this already taught and compact poem, and the result is a work that is clearly written for our singers - full of joy and pain, hope and pessimism.
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