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Home , Rudresh Mahanthappa, Vijay Iyer

A Passage to India

Rudresh Mahanthappa chooses a heritage.

BY GARY GIDDINS

Mahanthappa is wary of facile Indian- fusions. Photograph by Ethan Levitas.

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 released an astonishing album, “Kinsmen,” on a small - 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 , 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 , 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 focused 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.

While Mahanthappa was at Berklee, his older brother teasingly gave him an album called “Saxophone Indian Style,” by . 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 yoga like 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 , 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 , 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 and the drummer , 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. ♦