JACK Quartet plays John Luther Adams

Across the last 20 years, the JACK Quartet has emerged as one of the country’s most enterprising string quartets, heirs apparent to the spirit and success of peers like the Kronos. After meeting at the Eastman School of Music, the group immediately cultivated accessibility and flexibility, as comfortable with grand concert halls as intimate bars. In the decades since, they have recorded the new works of John Zorn, Cenk Ergün, and Brian Baumbusch, plus pieces by the likes of Steve Reich and Iannis Xenakis. The New York Times called the JACK “one of contemporary music’s indispensable ensembles,” due to its “sprawling stylistic range … [and] precision and passion.”

The JACK’s most revelatory relationship, though, has been with John Luther Adams, the pioneering composer whose decades in Alaska shaped his understanding that music could not only be a vector to express the sublime essence of nature but also to create a deeper understanding of it. He composed his first string quartet, 2011’s The Wind in High Places, based on his long-ago observations of holding an Aeolian harp above the tundra. The JACK recorded Adams’s fifth, Lines Made by Walking, for a 2020 album of the same name; as expansive as a virgin forest or an uninterrupted desert, its sound fields are carved with slow, winding lines of distended melody. It is music that is entrancing and transportive, earning the JACK a Grammy nomination. They have since recorded Adams’ Waves and Particles and, with The Crossing, his Sila: The Breath of the World. The JACK performs a series of his quartets at Big Ears 2026.