Time for Three makes time for Boulder

The three-piece string group brings their ‘classically trained garage band’ back to Boulder

0

Despite their impossibly booked schedule, the gentlemen of Time For Three always make time for Boulder — this time they’ll drop by the Boulder Theater on Jan. 8 for a fundraiser concert for the Colorado Music Festival & Center for Musical Arts.

“[Boulder is] a second home for us for sure,” says Ranaan Meyer, double bassist for the Indiana-based string trio. “The Colorado Music Festival we consider family. We’ve been there four summers, so this will be our fifth appearance that they are presenting us at — there’s history there,” says Meyer.

There’s so much history, in fact, that the trio — which also includes violinists Zach De Pue and Nick Kendall, who met Meyer in 2001 while students at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music — regularly stays in the homes of CMF board members while in town.

“Whenever there’s a community and an environment supsee porting music in the way Colorado Music Festival patrons are, it’s something to get behind as an artist because it’s the way that we live in our world, in the musical community: by people who get involved and support it,” says Meyer.

The community at CMF includes Steve Hackman, known for his fluency in both classical and popular repertoire. It is this fluency that recently placed Hackman at the helm of CMF’s “Mash-Up” Series, where Radiohead meets Brahms and Coldplay mingles effortlessly with Beethoven.

Hackman is a longtime friend and collaborator of Time for Three — Tf3 for short — and it’s no wonder considering their shared fascination with blending the worlds of pop and classical music.

“We’ll take an arrangement [of a pop song], say, “Firework” by Katy Perry, and you’ll find the “Firebird Suite” by Stravinsky in there,” Meyers explains. “I like to compare it to fusion cuisine.”

Their music is part Bela Fleck, part Beethoven, a place where hip-hop can meet Haydn.

It was Hackman who co-arranged the trio’s classical take on the Kanye West song “Stronger.” The video, with its anti-bullying message, became a YouTube sensation that catapulted Tf3 to another level of fame in 2012.

But Tf3’s success wasn’t something the band themselves, let alone the classical music industry, saw coming.

“When Time for Three was created, we weren’t really told by the industry that we were going to be successful,” Meyer says with a chuckle. “[They told us] ‘Hold on to your day jobs because two violins and a bass, that’s so hard to market — no one really knows what you do. Keep at it, but don’t bet on it,’” Meyer says of the group’s genre-busting musical stylings.

Despite the classical music industry’s confusion and hesitation, Meyer says he never felt like he and his band mates had any other choice but to play together.

“We were attracted to each other because of our personalities and this ambition of wanting to get together and jam after orchestra rehearsal, and it wasn’t more profound than that.”

They played then as they do now, Meyer says: for the love of music and the deep appreciation they’ve always felt from audiences.

“So we hung in there. Now we have this really big career and get to travel the world and play music.”

Nearly 15 years later, Time for Three has four albums, a substantial catalog of original music and a Rolodex full of prominent orchestral composers (such as Hackman) ready to create commissioned pieces for whatever occasions the trio might have.

The boys have performed at Carnegie Hall (in casual attire, as always), famed San Francisco jazz club Yoshi’s, NFL games and on Dancing with the Stars, not to mention their five-years-and-running residency with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra.

Meyer says he thinks the type of genre bending that Tf3 practices is what propels the art of classical music.

“I think the way that this art form is going to continue to go is by really keeping it so you’re having new, innovative minds within the industry, people willing to push the envelope,” Meyer explains. “The reason classical music has been around for hundreds of years is because the developers, advocators [and] composers are all people who wanted to push things forward.”

Andrew Bradford, executive director of the Colorado Music Festival & Center for Musical Arts, says this attitude about “pushing the envelope” is what makes Tf3 such a favorite of CMF patrons.

“They know how to put on a good show but they also have a unique way of breaking down the barrier between stage and audiences, which is something that as a classical music organization we’re constantly striving to archive,” Bradford says.

“With Time for Three, they make classical music cool, they make it accessible. … I think that might be the greatest contribution they make in the way of education, is making it accessible to all, to experience it, to fall in love with it,” Bradford adds.

For Meyer, Kendell and De Pue, it’s really just as simple as having a love of music.

“We just happened to find our way through classical music. The world is such a small-slash-vast musical place — there’s so much to sample from,” Meyer says. “It’s really just been about using our imaginations and dreaming about music and styles that could go together and not wanting to categorize and get in the way of something that’s in our heads. Our approach to music is wonderfully childish. It’s like getting in the sand box and playing with each other and making up games as we go along. It happens after years and tens of thousands of hours of practice married with that childish mindset, but it’s phenomenal because we keep that spirit going as we mature.”

For those who want to spend a little more time with Time for Three and further support the CMF, diamond and gold circle VIP packages allow patrons to attend a three-course, pre concert dinner at the Rembrandt Yard and then attend a special meet and greet at License No. 1 after the concert. Tickets are available at www.bouldertheater.com/event/time-for-three.

Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com