Music

Photo: Evan Neff

The Kronos Quartet (foreground) performs at SFJazz Center with Trio Da Kali: Fodé Lassana Diabaté (left), Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté and Mamadou Kouyaté.

The Kronos Quartet (foreground) performs at SFJazz Center with Trio...

You think you’ve seen it all in terms of musical cross-cultural eclecticism — or a lot of it, anyway — and then you hear an exuberant jam featuring a griot troupe from Mali, a string quartet and a guy playing a musical saw. Then you realize it’s time to recalibrate a little.

That surprise combination hit the SFJazz Center on Friday, April 27, as an impromptu encore to conclude the second concert in the Kronos Quartet’s annual weekend-long festival. Like much of the evening’s program, it was a delight — a musical fusion that felt both improbable and deeply right.

Kronos has been engaged in this sort of collaboration for decades, of course. The group latches onto anything that catches the omnivorous musical fancy of founder and artistic director David Harrington, and brings it into the orbit of the string quartet world — or better still, goes forth to meet it halfway.

And that particular aspect of the group’s artistic DNA is what sets the festival, now in its fourth year, apart from simply a series of concerts. From the opening show on Thursday, April 26 (with performance duo CocoRosie, tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain and Iranian vocalist Mahsa Vahdat), through Saturday’s partnerships with the Amaranth Quartet, the San Francisco Girls Chorus and Vietnamese-born performer Vân-Ánh Võ, this was a lineup devoted to showing off the extraordinary range of musical worlds in which a string quartet can take part.

On Friday, the biggest and most flattering spotlight shone on Trio Da Kali, the irresistible Malian ensemble devoted to the traditions of West African hereditary entertainers. The members are musical director Fodé Lassana Diabaté, who plays the vibraphone-like balafon, singer Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté and Mamadou Kouyaté, who plays the bass ngoni (a stringed instrument) with the unflappable panache of bass players everywhere.

For an hour, these musicians and the members of Kronos (Harrington, violinist John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Sunny Yang) rolled through excerpts from their recent recording “Ladilikan,” creating and then subtly disrupting smooth rhythmic landscapes. The music has an easy, often jaunty gait that melds beautifully with the soaringly expressive vocals; Mahalia Jackson’s “God Shall Wipe All Tears Away” fit right into the playlist.

As for the saw, that was the province of David Coulter, the musical polymath who is the festival’s artist-in-residence. For the encore of the CD’s title track, Coulter sat in with the rest, using bow and mallet to make the tool’s bendable metal produce a panoply of eerie moans and fierce pings. That, too, felt wonderfully of a piece.

The first half of the program was so chockablock with short, diverse offerings as to seem like a tasting menu. The Dragon String Quartet, a fine ensemble of teen musicians from San Francisco’s School of the Arts (violinists Lucy Nelligan and Ben Hudak, violist Kana Luzmoor and cellist Isabelle Fromme) got things off to a suave start, partnering with Diabaté in an excerpt from his composition “Sunjata’s Time.”

Jack Nitzsche’s music from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” arranged by Jacob Garchik, put Coulter and his saw front and center, with ingratiating results. Kronos played new pieces by Guillermo Galindo (”Remote Control,” which involved audience members playing video on their mobile devices) and Philip Glass (the short, beguiling “Quartettsatz”), and the blues-rock singer Jolie Holland played a short set with the quartet as backup.

All of it served as a reminder, yet again, that there’s more or less nothing a string quartet can’t do, so long as they put their minds to it.

Kronos Quartet: 11 a.m., 2 p.m., 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 28. $20-$65. SFJazz Center, 201 Franklin St., San Francisco. (866) 920-5299, www.sfjazz.org