[JPL] A Passage to India: Rudresh Mahanthappa chooses a heritage.

[E. Flashner]

Hello Everyone,

Real nice article in the new New Yorker by Gary Giddins on Rudresh
Mahanthappa:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2009/03/02/090302crmu_music_giddins

- Flash

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Jazz A Passage to India Rudresh Mahanthappa chooses a heritage.  by Gary
Giddins<http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?query=authorName:%22Gary%20Giddins%22>
March 2, 2009

Jazz musicians have two fundamental goals: creating music that keeps
listeners wondering what’s next, and finding a novel context within which to
explore old truths. (There are no new truths.) Whenever a musician achieves
this synthesis, usually after years of apprenticeship and exploration, a
rumble echoes through the jazz world. Such a rumble was heard last fall,
when the thirty-seven-year-old alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa released
an astonishing album, “Kinsmen,” on a small New York-based label (Pi),
quickly followed by another no less astonishing, “Apti,” on a small
Minnesota-based label (Innova). The breakthrough had been a long time
coming, and, curiously enough, it justifies ethnic assumptions that
Mahanthappa had for much of his career been working to escape. With a name
that may require concentration (second syllables are accented: Ru-*dresh*Ma-
*hahn*-tha-pa), he has often been presumed to be an Indian-born saxophonist
involved in some kind of Indian-jazz fusion, but he is actually as American
as apple pie, or Barack Obama. For more than a decade, in close association
with a contemporary of similar background, the pianist and composer Vijay
Iyer, he had circled classical Indian music with cautious respect, reluctant
to exploit a tradition about which he knew little.

Born in 1971, Mahanthappa grew up in Boulder, in one of the very few
Indian-American families there. He studied Baroque recorder for two years,
then switched to alto saxophone at the age of eleven, coming under the
influence of a teacher who exposed him to everything from Sidney Bechet to
Frank Zappa. By ninth grade, Mahanthappa was fronting a band that, by his
own account, tortured tunes by Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and others he
admired. He graduated from Berklee College of Music, and went on to earn a
master’s in jazz composition at DePaul University, in Chicago. Through the
alto saxophonist Steve Coleman, whose M-Base collective inspired many young
musicians in the nineteen-nineties, Mahanthappa met Iyer, and they could
scarcely believe that there were two jazz musicians of South Indian heritage
with routinely mispronounced names. They learned a lot from each other; Iyer
focussed on rhythm and Mahanthappa on melody, and when they heard of an
opportunity to play in Toronto they rehearsed for three days and made their
début as a duo.

Both men were suspicious of the Indian borrowings that had become
commonplace in jazz since the sixties, and which usually produced
oil-and-water confrontations or mannerly gimmicks—a tabla in the rhythm
section, say. Mahanthappa was also wary of Coltrane’s use of Indian
ragas—ancient scales that, unlike Western ones, are wedded to drones rather
than harmony, which doesn’t exist in classical Indian music—and of his
attempt to invoke the sound of the double-reed *shehnai* with his soprano
saxophone. Moving to New York in 1997, Mahanthappa performed and recorded
prolifically with Iyer, producing an impressive series of CDs—including the
duo album “Raw Materials,” Iyer’s “Blood Sutra,” and Mahanthappa’s “Black
Water,” “Mother Tongue,” and “Codebook.” To the degree that they borrowed
anything from South India, it was subsumed by the sheer ebullience they
brought to playing jazz—Iyer with his percussive attack, rangy moods, and
fastidious wit (a recent composition is “Macaca Please”), and Mahanthappa
with his lavish timbre, which places particular emphasis on the often
neglected lower register of his instrument, and his ability to convey a
state of elation.

W hile Mahanthappa was at Berklee, his older brother teasingly gave him an
album called “Saxophone Indian Style,” by Kadri Gopalnath. As far as
Mahanthappa knew, “Indian saxophonist” was an oxymoron, but the album amazed
him. Gopalnath, who was born in 1950, in Karnataka, plays a Western
instrument in a non-Western context—the Carnatic music of Southern India
(distinct from the Hindustani musical tradition of Northern India).
Gopalnath, who generally plays in a yogalike seated position, has perfected
something that jazz saxophonists have been attempting for decades: moving
beyond the Western chromatic scale into the realm of microtones, a feat
harder for wind instruments, whose keys are in fixed positions, than for
strings or voice. Jazz players, such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and
Albert Ayler, had gone about it by varying intonation, blowing multiphonics
(two or more notes at the same time), or squawking in the upper register,
where pitches are imprecisely defined. Gopalnath does none of that. Using
alternate fingerings and innovative embouchure techniques, he maintains
faultless intonation while sliding in and out of the chromatic scale.

Mahanthappa resolved to work with Gopalnath, using a grant to finance a
visit to India. Then he immersed himself in Carnatic music, studying
instrumental techniques, the infinitely complex system of ragas, and the
talas—rhythmic systems based on repeated cycles of beats. Much as Dizzy
Gillespie had wedded jazz chord changes to Cuban rhythms in the
nineteen-forties, Mahanthappa wrote music that blended Western harmony with
South Indian traditions, searching for a style in which American and Indian
players might find a common ground without sacrificing their respective
improvisational approaches.

Mahanthappa’s collaboration with Gopalnath débuted at sold-out concerts in
2005 and 2007, and is documented in the spellbinding “Kinsmen.” The album is
organized around five extended pieces, usually preceded by brief *alaps*—rubato
improvisations, generally played by a single instrumentalist. The opening
one, “Introspection,” uses three guitar tones as a platform for a
seductively mournful Mahanthappa solo that exemplifies his ability to stay
in tune while employing quarter tones and ferocious dissonances. It’s a
disarming introduction to the splendid roar of “Ganesha,” a six-bar blues
pitched in B-flat. Mahanthappa plays the main theme alone and then in tandem
with Rez Abbasi, a guitarist from California with family roots in Pakistan,
while Gopalnath and the Indian violinist A. Kanyakumari play a
countermelody. Three things are instantly evident: the music is meticulously
ordered; it has a massed density that suggests an illusory approach to free
jazz; and it swings like mad. “Ganesha,” like all the longer pieces, moves
fast; individual solos are short, and are passed like a relay baton.
Gopalnath and Mahanthappa used a traditional series of cues, and when
Gopalnath plays a short riff three times it means that he is passing off to
the younger man, who, quick on his feet, repeats his sign-off phrase and
amps up the tension with a straight blues invention, accompanied only by the
*mridangam*, a double-sided barrel drum played by Poovalur Sriji. When the
traps drummer, Royal Hartigan, enters to back the guitar solo, he introduces
a march rhythm right out of a New Orleans second line, and when both
percussionists back the violinist the rhythm takes on a Carnatic intensity
that inclines the listener to an upper-body response—more a swaying of the
shoulders than a tapping of the feet.

Every track has equally fascinating intersections, whether deliberated or
serendipitous. “Longing” sounds like a bebop ballad or the kind of tune that
might have backed a sultry scene in a fifties detective movie, yet it is
based faithfully on a raga and plotted with rhythmic vamps. At first,
“Snake!” is the most traditional-sounding Indian piece, with Gopalnath,
violin, and *mridangam* playing the melody, while Mahanthappa plays whole
notes in accompaniment. But then an abrupt rest signals a shift for the
Americans to take over for a wild couple of minutes—culturally diverse ways
to achieve the appearance of complete musical liberty. “Kalyani” begins
contemplatively and opens into fleet improvisations of uncanny speed and
lightness. *Alaps* by Gopalnath and Kanyakumari are lessons in equilibrium,
establishing the gravity of a central note and then going far off into space
before returning, over and over again. Kanyakamuri imbues her instrument
with vocalized emotions, alternately purring and craggy, building to
terrific velocity. But the best is yet to come: the fevered “Convergence
(Kinsmen),” configured on a twelve-beat bass line, with perhaps the best
solos of the session—including an interlude with Mahanthappa accompanied by
drums that suggests some of the inspired interplay of Coltrane and Rashid
Ali, and a three-minute episode of exchanges between the two altoists that
begin with eight- and four-bar handoffs and escalate to a delirium of echoed
phrases, converging on a high D sharp—at which point you may realize that
you’ve been holding your breath for some time.

“Apti,” a trio album by Mahanthappa, with Abbasi and tabla player Dan Weiss,
is something of a sequel to “Kinsmen,” and, with its sparer instrumentation,
it also serves as a kind of skeletal breakdown, clarifying “Kinsmen” ’s
stylistic juxtapositions. The first track, “Looking Out, Looking In,” is a
brief invocation that starts off seeming Indian but ends up sounding very
American, and steeped in blues. Similarly, if “Palika Market” favors the
asymmetrical steps of the raga, the exquisite “Adana” is tempered by a cool
swing feeling. Mahanthappa has said that he didn’t anticipate the enthusiasm
these albums have triggered and, with a long jazz career before him, hopes
that audiences won’t expect him to build exclusively on this project. His
other recent playing—particularly on Iyer’s album “Tragicomic” and in a trio
with the bassist Mark Dresser and the drummer Gerry Hemingway, both veteran
freethinkers—should indemnify him from such pigeonholing, but “Kinsmen” is a
momentous achievement that will be around for a long time to come. ♦