I agree with Ethan Hein about wondering whether the Kronos Quartet's attempt to play Jimi Hendrix was successful. I lean "no". The tempi for the different sections of the "Purple Haze" arrangement jack knifes away any possibility of either attempted groove actually working. The down tempo intro is slower than what Hendrix did and the verse-and-chorus arrangement is faster than what Hendrix did and in neither case does a steady groove happen as the cumulative result.
And the quartet arrangement of "Dark Was the Night" is frustrating beyond words. Ethan Hein notes there's no groove but there's also no low end. The groove that lives and breathes beneath Blind Willie Johnson's amazing performance is bolstered by those droning bass strings.
Mahalia Jackson did an amazing solo voice performance of the lining hymn, so a spare, minimalist approach to the song can absolutely work.
As for jazz violin, I tend to think of Ray Nance's wonderful solo on "Bakiff".
The thing I'm thinking is that if a string quartet isn't going to get the groove of folk blues and they have the chops to get at timbrel variation and microtonal inflections there should be two things going on. The first is low end. The second is that some kind of heterophony that replicates the heterophony that often shows up in lining hymn performances should have happened and the Kronos arrangement doesn't get any heterophonic/quasi-polyphonic patterns going for long. That would also, probably, require an arranger and ensemble to find out what groove against which the heterophony or polyphony would be playing against.
It's a harsh appraisal to make but the Kronos "Dark was the Night" arrangement gets the sound effects but doesn't breath like a lining hymn. Maybe I'm biased both as a fan of Blind Willie Johnson and as someone who has soaked up a bit of church music in my life. I was Assemblies of God rather than Church of God in Christ Pentecostal (Johnson's denominational affiliation) but the older I get the more I wonder whether or not there are things you learn about how styles of music live and breath through direct participation that are hard to replicate on the instruments of classical music if you aren't constantly going back to the well of the proverbial folklore and refining and updating your instrumental or vocal techniques to think through how to translate the idioms and vocabulary of styles into "classical" settings.
Which gets me to agreeing with Hein that the Darol Anger take on "Voodoo Chile" is far, far better. The dance may be comparatively square but it's a dance. The groove is there and the materials are translated into the dance musical idioms of the fiddler.
Maybe what I'm trying to say is that Ethan is right that there's the groove to consider with my being a former choral singer from my school days there's also a need to understand the nature of the song. Johnson's take on "Dark Was the Night" is really a remarkably sophisticated and even esoteric take on the lining hymn tradition, building on generations of musical participations and innovations to reach the lofty and nearly inimitable peak of his legendary performance.
I'm not against the basic idea of a string quartet attempting to tackle making music based on Johnson's legacy but I do think that in light of all the things that are difficult to emulate about the groove and song of his most famous recording it makes more sense to emulate those aspects in works that aren't such literal tributes to his work. I'm biased, I realize, because my approach as a guitarist has been to compose music that takes cues from elements of Johnson's technique; styles of music that existed during his time; and the kinds of hymnody (shape note or otherwise) that he could have drawn on to make a Johnson-esque take on hymns he never arranged or recorded but theoretically could have. That seems like a more careful way to pay tribute to his life and work without risking an attempt to replicate his most famous performance in a way that can only make later efforts seem to fall short. It would almost be better to have a quasi-fugal polyphonic fantasia based on Johnson's licks and vocalization than to attempt to replicate his quarter-tone-off phrases and lose the pulsating life in the phrases.
There are some things where I admit to being fairly purist, I guess. Johnson's music is one of those things.
UPDATE 10-4-2021 6:17pm
There's virtually no academic work I know of done on Johnson's music and the biographical work I've heard and read about would never rise above what Matanya Ophee once called "liner notes musicology". There is, however, a book I picked up I'm looking forward to reading by William T. Dargan about the lining hymn tradition in general
If anyone else has books or articles dealing with the history of the lining hymn traditions comments are moderated but are welcome (if you've snooped around this blog a few years you can guess why comments are moderated).
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