PERFORMING ARTS

Turtle Island Quartet And Leo Kottke

The Turtle Island Quartet, which appeared at the Music Center at Strathmore Wednesday night, is all about fusion. For more than two decades, this crossover group has won fame by absorbing almost any kind of music -- classical, pop or in between -- and coating it with its particular brand of jazz idioms, nostalgic blues harmonies, folk-tune simplicity, swing, complex Indian raga patterns, whirling dance rhythms or even ancient hymn melodies. The quartet (violinists David Balakrishnan and Matt Glaser, who subbed for member Evan Price, violist Mads Tolling and cellist Mark Summer) then further refines all these styles with its versatile improvisatory art.

The TIQ's program, billed as "A Solstice Celebration: The Festival of Lights," is traditionally marked in many world climes with, for example, Hanukkah songs, Asian melodies or Christmas carols. This holiday music coincides with the current season of longest nights, magically illuminated Wednesday by an early snowstorm.

As an added feature, well-known guitar soloist Leo Kottke filled the pre-intermission time with imaginative vocal and instrumental arrangements played on his acoustic instruments: the standard guitar and a 12-string version (amplified to fit the capacious Strathmore). Kottke's technique ran from seemingly casual strumming to full-speed finger virtuosity with the impact of a symphony orchestra, larded with wry narrative comments.

The quartet took the stage for the rest of the concert to offer a wild range of selections that incorporated Scottish fiddling, touches of swing, square-dance lustiness, classical waltz rhythms emanating from "Silent Night" and bluegrass. The cello often went into pizzicato (plucking instead of bowing the strings), very much like the string bass of a traditional jazz band.

At times, though, the quartet's improvs sounded more rehearsed than spontaneous; and towards the end of the show, the group's no-fail foot-stomping beat suggested a certain sameness to the evening's musicmaking. But the near-capacity audience loved it.

-- Cecelia Porter

Adjagas

The Sami people are natives of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and part of Russia, and they have a word that represents the semiconscious state between sleep and wakefulness: adjagas.

The Sami-led band that performed at the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage on Wednesday has claimed Adjagas as its moniker, but the group doesn't perform full-on trance music. Adjagas marries dreamy sounds -- the ancient yoik singing of core members Lawra Somby and Sara Marielle Gaup -- with pop music styles played on guitar, bass, banjo, piano, trumpet and drums.

It's a lovely hybrid sound that presents yoik -- which roughly sounds like Native American chanting -- through a prism of folk, blues, jazz and electronica.

The musicians' outfits also incorporated the ancient and current: The impish Gaup came onstage in black leggings, red-and-green shawl and reindeer-hide miniskirt, looking like Holly Golightly of the North Pole. Somby wore more traditional Sami clothing, from his brightly colored triangle-shaped top to his reindeer-leather pants and shoes. And both the dark-haired Gaup and Somby looked different from their band mates, who were of Norwegian heritage and had adopted the standard indie-rock dress code.

All the players were highly trained, switching instruments with ease and adding smart harmonic touches that deepened the arrangements of the otherwise simple songs.

Adjagas crammed 14 tunes into its main set, which ended eight minutes past the Millennium Stage's notoriously hard-and-fast 7 p.m. cutoff time. But Adjagas, ignoring that the house lights were flipped on and the ushers were already moving in to clear out the audience, came back to perform one more song for the applauding crowd.

The house lights never dimmed during Adjagas's encore, leaving the listeners somewhere between the wide-awake world and its dreamier counterpart. How appropriate.

-- Christopher Porter