Music Without Boundaries

Featured Artists

Transcript

By the time Ranaan Meyer was 11, he had already given up two musical instruments, the piano and the cello. Soon his mother, a concert pianist, had had enough.

Ranaan Meyer: My mom said, “Look, you spent the first decade of your life quitting. That’s not the way these next 10 years are gonna go. You’re gonna pick an instrument, you’re gonna play it. That’s the end of the story.”

It turned out to be just the start of his story. Meyer stuck with the bass and wanted music to become a core part of his life. But he knew there was an uphill journey ahead.

Meyer: When I fell in love with music, there were all these other bass players that had been playing and taking music very seriously from an early age so I had a lot of catching up to do, which meant I had to practice around the clock.

Meyer’s dedication got him into the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, one of the world’s great conservatories. Once there, he began collaborating with two other students in what would become Time for Three. Self-described as a “classically-trained garage band,” the trio, with Meyer on bass and Nick Kendall and Charles Yang on violin, has played around the world, melding classical training with a wide spray of musical styles. Like Meyer, Nick Kendall also began playing music at the insistence of his parents and chose the violin. His early classical training made him want to understand all kinds of music.

Nick Kendall: My first non-classical sounds of a violin were on 88.5 WAMU. Every Sunday they had a bluegrass channel and I started hearing this music and I started hearing this violin sound so alive and fantastic and that really kind of captured an energy that I think was always within myself. And so I found high school buddies and we had, actually I had a street drumming, trash can street drumming band that would play on the weekends in Georgetown. All the way up until school I had folk bands, while I was at Curtis, actually the first summer that I moved here to Philadelphia, I actually street performed.

At Curtis, Kendall began seeking out other similarly inquisitive young musicians and connected with the jazz-obsessed Meyer.

Meyer: He found me and he said, you know, “Do you wanna jam?” And we had what I would call a very intuitive jam session. And I don’t know, because of the incredible chops that Nick brought to the table we were able to do some pretty magical things.

Eventually a third musician, violinist Zachary DePue, joined and the trio became Time for Tree. Their big break came in 2003. Meyer and DePue were performing as members of the Philadelphia Orchestra when the power failed. But instead of calling off the evening, the pair volunteered to entertain the waiting crowd.

Meyer: We played, you could hear a pin drop the entire time until they applauded. And after we did about a 20 minute set, they asked for an encore set so we came back out and we played the rest of our repertoire. We only had about 20 minutes left and that was it. That was the show.

A report about their impromptu performance made it into an international music magazine, and after that Time for Three was invited to perform at Carnegie Hall, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and on the TV show Dancing with the Stars. Time for Three became defined by a knack for genre-bending and improvisation. That flexibility also helped the group navigate its own changes. In 2016, DePue left the trio. Another violinist, Nikki Chooi, briefly joined the group, but soon after also left. Then came Charles Yang. Yang grew up in Austin, Texas, and began playing the violin almost as soon as he could hold one.

Charles Yang: My mom is also a violin player, fled the cultural revolution, came to the United States and joined the Austin Symphony. So I was born right after a show that she had, literally the next day and kind of forced to play the violin because my mom’s a violin player, gave me a violin at age three. I don’t remember a time that I didn’t play violin.

In high school, Yang started practicing guitar on his own and became the lead singer of a rock band. But these non-classical pursuits were the source of some tension at home.

Yang: They were loving parents. You know, they wanted me to succeed. And in Texas, at least it’s very hard, you don’t see an Asian blues musician, you don’t see many Asians, at least in my little town. You didn’t see many pop stars that were Asian or singers. What you did see were a lot of classical musicians. So it was a path for them to say, “Hey, listen, you can take this path. You can go to Juilliard and make a career out of doing this. Don’t take the risk.”

But Yang found a way to get the best of both worlds. He continued his classical studies at the Juilliard School in New York but he didn’t give up on his interest in other kinds of music. And when he joined Time for Three in 2016, he brought another element that expanded what the group was doing: singing. The change was evident from the first song the newly composed trio wrote together, “Joy”.

Yang: I’d just joined the band and we were just sitting at the piano, found this chord progression, transferred it over to the violin, bass, and then we just started literally yelling on top of this chord progression, which became the chorus. We decided to implement Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in there, you know, “Ode to Joy.” Why not write a song about how Beethoven provided so much joy to the world but lived a tough life, no one really talks about that. And that became something that stuck.

Time for Three’s unconventional performance style has also inspired some of the greatest living musicians to write specifically for the group. In May 2021, the trio teamed up with the Philadelphia Orchestra to record two of these pieces. One, “Concerto 4-3” was created for the group in 2007 by the Pulitzer Prize and Grammy-winning composer, Jennifer Higdon.

Jennifer Higdon: First of all, this was an unusual thing. It’s a concerto for, three guys who want to do bluegrass but with an orchestra doing more traditional music.

Higdon had grown up listening to bluegrass music in Tennessee. Still, she was unsure she could write a piece that mixed bluegrass and classical styles.

Higdon: Which is what made me really stop and think, “All right, think about your past, think about what you know about bluegrass, what do you feel about it?” Which allowed me to go back and explore it and say, “All right, what properties does a classical piece have and what properties does a bluegrass piece have?” There’s got to be overlap, of course. And there’s more overlap than one would think. Bluegrass really thrives off the offbeat. We just don’t think about doing that that much. But you know, Beethoven, beats were an important thing, so I was surprised that it actually worked, like it worked out of the gate. I was shocked, let’s just put it that way. I wasn’t surprised. I was like, “Whoa, I can’t believe it worked.”

The other orchestra work made for Time for Three was “Contact” by Kevin Puts, another Pulitzer Prize-winning composer. From the get go, Puts wanted to really understand who he was writing for.

Yang: With Kevin, he came to many of our shows just to study us. It’s like, what is this band like? What kind of harmonies do they play all the time? What kind of techniques do they do? He really was hoping to push the edge there and really collaborate with us.

Kevin Puts: The wonderful thing about Time for Three is that they’re so intelligent. They can look at a full score and they say, “Oh, I see the woodwinds are playing here, and the violins are playing col legno you know, with their bow.” And we didn’t know what it was about. I started the piece, the one thing I had this idea for was that they might start the piece singing, which they do very well. So it begins with nothing else, just their voices. What would be inferred about our DNA? If some distant intelligence heard this, what would they think? What would it mean about us? Maybe that’s something that we care about, growth. We care about development, we care about not staying in the same place. I don’t know, I have no idea. But anyway, then we just started thinking, this is how we’ll frame this piece. It’s about contact, it’s about reaching out. And that’s how the title came about.

It’s hard to pin down exactly what Time for Three is. Their music isn’t defined by any specific style or sound. For them, it’s about breaking down any traditional ideas of genre, of who lives where, of taking us without prejudice to new and enlivening places and blazing a path for others to do the same.

Kendall: What’s so wonderful about this moment, being able to record “Concerto 4-3” with the Philadelphia Orchestra, is that it represents such a golden time in my life right at that cusp when I was finding myself as an artist after leaving Curtis into the big, vast world, not knowing if I wanted to be a soloist, or wanting to be in a chamber group, or how Time for Three would fit in. And then sort of taking time to figure all that out and then revisiting this piece with all of that time and experience in between under my belt, and then coming back to home in a lot of ways.

Yang: Every member in this band plays a unique role in this band. And you know, Ranaan from the jazz background, I come from this rock and roll blues background, and Nick has this sense of rhythm from when he used to play pots and pans out in Rittenhouse Square. You know, it works really well.

Meyer: There’s this old world that had handcuffs on so many different genres and artists. And then there’s this new world that is just inviting. And we’re like right there on the cusp or like on the top of the mountain. We can go either down the other way or go back home. And Nick and I at the birth of Time for Three were somehow in this very fortunate position where we had an opportunity to go down the mountain and explore all of the terrain.

After many years and iterations of who and what Time for Three looks and sounds like, the trio is energized for their next chapter. There’s no telling what that future holds, yet it’s probably a safe bet that, like their music, they’ll approach it with open minds, curiosity, and joy.