Nonesuch Records: Sui Generis

After supper, my husband and I usually repair to the living room to read and to listen to music. One evening, as we do frequently, we loaded in six CDs and punched the random play button.

First the estimable pianist Richard Goode played a Bach partita, followed by soprano Dawn Upshaw singing a stylishly warm rendition of a Broadway standard. An imaginative ten-minute meditation by jazz guitarist Pat Metheny gave way to a version of a fourteenth-century canon by the ensemble Alarm Will Sound with added percussion that highlighted its complex cross-rhythms. Next, Stephin Merritt's gravelly bass voice sang one of his sad love ballads with the Magnetic Fields band, followed by the Kronos Quartet performing a pan-Arab hit tune arranged by the quartet and Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov.

In its breadth of music, this was a fairly typical listening evening for us. Spanning roughly four centuries, and encompassing what used to be thought of as high and low culture, the music came from several continents and encompassed jazz, Broadway, world music, classical music, contemporary and early music. The transitions from one track to the next—chosen at random by the CD player—were surprising, often jarring. But the juxtapositions refreshed the ears and opened the mind to new connections. What was unusual was that all of the recordings were released on one label—Nonesuch.

Nonesuch has been a bellwether since it was founded in 1964 as a budget classical label. Under the early leadership of iconoclastic producer Teresa Sterne, and in recent decades the supremely talented Robert Hurwitz, the label has been eclectic and genre-busting. Its quirky back story consists of a parade of now-legendary releases that became cultural game-changers. It was Nonesuch that introduced 1960s mass audiences to world music through its Explorer Series, and later sold a million copies of music by Scott Joplin, setting off the craze for ragtime jazz. Nonesuch put out the early works of John Adams and Philip Glass, John Zorn and the Kronos Quartet, which became surprise hits—unheard of for serious contemporary music. It was Nonesuch that released Henryk Górecki's Third Symphony, selling more than three million copies. Who would have guessed that hits could also be made out of the Bulgarian State Television female choir? Or tangos by Astor Piazzolla? Nonesuch has a global reach, encompassing The Gipsy Kings, the Buena Vista Social Club, Brazilian pop star Caetano Veloso, Wilco, the Black Keys, Youssou N'Dour and Gidon Kremer, and Laurie Anderson—just to name a few.

A handful of recent releases illustrates the vision—and the risk-taking—that has always characterized Nonesuch.

The Kronos Quartet's recent album, Floodplain, has a geopolitical theme. The liner notes explain that the dozen tracks come from "lowlying places bordering rivers, and the places where human civilization was born and first flourished," that is to say places like Serbia, Kazakhstan, Iran, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine—spots often more associated with roadside bombings than with music. This is not an ethnomusicological compendium of traditional music, nor is it a Western string quartet playing arrangements; instead, like the music of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project, what is offered here is a thoughtful blend of cultures—artistic appropriations that do not purport to be purely authentic in either the historical or ethnic sense.

The album's catchy opening, "Ya Habibi Ta'ala" (My Love, Come Quickly), is an Egyptian song from 1940 turned into a slithery tango, arranged by Osvaldo Golijov and played by the quartet along with Jamie Papish on riqq (an Arabic tambourine). In "Getme, Getme" (Don't Leave, Don't Leave), the quartet collaborates with the father-and-daughter singing duo, Alim Qasimov and Fargana Qasimova, and their ensemble from Azerbaijan; at times the quartet members play along with the traditional lines, and at other moments, they break into a kind of Western contemporary improvisation—it's a fascinating blend of contexts. In "Tèw Semagn Hagèré" (Listen to Me, My Fellow Countrymen), Jeffrey Zeigler plays an instrument inspired by the Ethiopian begena (a lyre with a buzzing...