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East Bay ExpressMarch 10, 2010MUSIC MUSIC
Intimate DialogueIndo-Pak Coalition melds Indian music and jazz
for a stylistically ambiguoussound.
By Jeffrey Callen
Like most musicians who suddenly burst onto the scene,
Rudresh
Mahanthappa has been working on his craft for a long time. His
reputation as
an innovative jazz musician and composer took a major leap from
the realms
of the cognoscenti into popular culture with the enthusiastic
reception of his
2008 album,Kinsmen. That album featured the Dakshina Ensemble,
co-led
by Mahanthappa and fellow alto saxophonist Kadri
Gopalnath.Kinsmen,
which melds jazz and South Indian Carnatic music, ended up on
more than
twenty top jazz CDs of 2008 lists, and the
prestigiousDownbeat
International Critics Poll named Mahanthappa a rising jazz
artist and alto
saxophonist of 2009. He also became the subject of numerous
features in The
New York Times , theNew Yorker, andRolling Stone . That's how
the
message used to come down from the cognoscenti to us hoi polloi
and,sometimes, even in this age of viral marketing, it continues to
do so and
sometimes, it still works.
The sudden success of Mahanthappa after the release ofKinsmen
was the
product of three years of work with Gopalnath, a living legend
of Indian
music, and twenty years of musical exploration that began
with
Mahanthappa's collaborations with pianist Vijay Iyer, another
American jazz
musician of Indian heritage, in 1996. Their 2006 release,Raw
Materials ,
exhibited their strengths as composers and improvisers in a
stripped-down
setting, just piano and saxophone, in which the musical source
materials
blended to create something original. Mahanthappa's musical
efforts are
decidedly peripatetic; refusing to limit himself to one musical
setting or style,
he typically splits his time as a composer and performer. His
web site,
RudreshM.com, lists eight ongoing projects: four featuring
Indian-jazz plus
his "flagship" ensemble the Rudresh Mahanthappa Quartet, two
jazz trios,
and a malleable group co-led with alto saxophonist Steve
Lehman.
One of Mahanthappa's Indian-jazz ensembles will be featured
Saturday
night, March 13, as the latest installment of SFJAZZ's "Global
Village" series.
The Indo-Pak Coalition is a trio that includes two of
Mahanthappa's long-
time sidemen: Pakistani-American guitarist Rez Abassi and Dan
Weiss on
tabla. The Indo-Pak Coalition presents a different spin on the
blending of
Indian music and jazz than Dakshina Ensemble. With the
Dakshina
Ensemble, the stage (and aural space) was split: a four-piece
jazz ensemble
on one side, a three-piece Carnatic ensemble on the other, and
the music
came as the product of a dialogue between two groups. The
musical styles
blended magnificently with much credit due to Mahanthappa's
skill as a
composer and the groundwork laid by Kadri Gopalnath in
developing a
Carnatic style of saxophone. The Indo-Pak Coalition presents
Indian-jazz in
a very different setting with very different goals. The Indian
musical
component of the Dakshina Ensemble was made up of Gopalnath on
alto
saxophone, A. Kanyakumari on violin, and Poovalur Sriji on
mridangam
(South Indian barrel drum) all formally trained in the Carnatic
tradition of
South India. The only member of the Indo- Pak Coalition with
formal training
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in South Asian music is drummer Dan Weiss of Brooklyn, who plays
the only
South Asian instrument in the ensemble: the tabla (a set of two
hand drums).
Despite the highly arranged sections the heads of tunes
frequently involve
fast unison passages the music created by the Indo-Pak Coalition
feels less
structured and more intimate than the dialogues created by the
Dakshina
Ensemble. The conversation is less call-and- response; more
overlapping like
the intertwining phrases of close friends.
The best way to get a taste of the music of the Indo-Pak
Coalition is through
its albumApti, released in 2008, a month after Dakshina
Ensemble'sKinsmen. The long rhythmic cycles of most of the songs
Mahanthappa
composed forApticreate the framework for the stylistic ambiguity
that is key
to its music. On the opening track, "Looking Out, Looking In,"
Abassi plays
slow arpeggios under Mahanthappa's soloing alto a non-typical
guitar
accompaniment that is reminiscent of a tamboura drone. The
second track,
"Apti," features a series of fast unison phrases on guitar and
alto that bring
jazz phrasing (and accidentals) to Hindustani melodies but makes
nods to a
Hindustani aesthetic, including several showy tihi- like phrase
enders (a tihi
is a triplet figure repeated three times). The unison phrases
set up long solos
by Mahanthappa and Abassi that are solidly post- bop but driven
by Weiss'
tabla. The sound of the tabla creates the least ambiguity,
injecting a South
Asian reference into otherwise musically ambiguous moments. That
is except
for Weiss' solo in "ITT" which evokes the sounds of a jazz drum
set before
deftly mixing them with the sounds of a tabla solo. Throughout,
the album is
a rewarding musical experience, and in its own way as refreshing
as
Kinsmen. Still, as with most jazz albums,Aptican only give a
taste of what
the Indo-Pak Coalition has to offer live. For that, check out
the band at the
Swedish American Hall on March 13.
