Time for “Time for Three”
By Kevin Downey
Listen up, music fans: A garage band with an increasingly rabid following is making its first stop ever in the Valley. Wait. Scratch that. Listen up, classical music fans…
Time for Three is playing Arizona Musicfest 2008, the seventeenth annual winter music festival featuring some of the top classical, opera, Broadway, and jazz musicians in a series of concerts across the North Valley. And, while a trio of two violinists and one bassist isn’t often big news, tf3’s gig in the Valley is. As classically trained twentysomethings based in Philadelphia, tf3 performs some 120 concerts each year to a fast-growing fan base.
The band has released two well-received CDs, and a third will come out when tf3, and not the music labels, decides which company is the best match for its music. And that’s a bit of a pickle. Time for Three (bassist Ranaan Meyer and violinists Nick Kendall and Zachary DePue) isn’t easily classified. It’s part garage band—jamming on original compositions until polished—and part classical trio. The group often plays straightforward classical music such as Brahms’s “Hungarian Dance No. 5,” but also mashes up classical elements with tunes like The Beatle’s “Blackbird.”
“We mess with these pieces to make them our own,” says Meyer. “None of these sounds exactly like people know them. But, at the same time, people will recognize them.” They also perform original songs, which Meyer describes as a hodgepodge of styles.
Tf3’s reputation has been building over the past several years, notably through segments on National Public Radio and through performances around the country. The band also recorded the soundtrack for The History Channel’s “Spanish-American War.”
The Valley hasn’t yet been on tf3’s tour schedule. But that will change with tf3’s performance at Musicfest on Feb. 26 and 27 at Fairway House at Grayhawk in Scottsdale.
“We have some music on the back burner [that] we’re working on that’ll make its way up to the front burner and, eventually, into our performances,” says Meyer. “We’ll probably have two or three new original pieces circulating by then.”
The band will be jamming their new tunes in the North Valley and, if the audience reception is anything like it’s been elsewhere in the country, this’ll be the first of many tf3 gigs here.
For more information on Arizona Musicfest 2008, visit azmusicfest.org. For more information on Time for Three, visit timeforthree.com.