An outburst of saxophone flurries sits you straight up in your chair. The tone is rich but with a cutting edge.
It has to be Rudresh Mahanthappa. The riveting cry of his alto saxophone is one of the most recognizable sounds in jazz.
But those darting runs coalesce into Charlie Parker’s “Red Cross.” So it can’t be Mahanthappa, can it? He has made 15 straight albums of original music. He doesn’t do covers, right?
On his 16th recording, Hero Trio, Mahanthappa breaks through to the past—his and ours. He proudly proclaims Parker’s bebop—but then “Red Cross” flies apart, into free showers of 16th notes. It is startling to hear Mahanthappa playing songs you know, even lilting ones like Stevie Wonder’s “Overjoyed” and time-honored standards like “I Can’t Get Started.” Of course, his versions do not stay lilting or standard for long. By the sixth track, you’re ready for anything—except “Ring of Fire.” Rudresh Mahanthappa doing a Johnny Cash song? There must be a story there.
The story begins in Colorado—specifically, Boulder. Mahanthappa’s father is a noted theoretical physicist who came to the United States from India to get a Ph.D. at Harvard and stayed in the American academic world, settling at the University of Colorado. The school’s website says that K. T. Mahanthappa is “interested in grand unification theories, fermion mixing and masses including charge fermions and neutrinos.” His son Rudresh shares a proclivity for the intellectually challenging and the arcane, but in 16th notes, not neutrinos. (There are two more sons in this high-achieving family, both with Ph.D.s in the sciences.)
Mahanthappa grew up in Boulder, listening to people like Stevie Wonder. He started on alto saxophone in the fourth grade. He matriculated at the University of North Texas in 1988, right after it changed its name from North Texas State. The school had a reputation for turning out notable jazz musicians. Billy Harper, Lyle Mays, Bob Belden, and David Weiss went there. So did Norah Jones, briefly. (So did Meat Loaf, briefly, though presumably not in the jazz program.) Snarky Puppy started there.
Mahanthappa was not happy at North Texas. He says, “For me it was an uncreative place. There was kind of one way of doing things. And as a brown person in Texas, I never felt comfortable.” After two years, he transferred to Berklee College of Music in Boston, a school even better known for turning out notable jazz musicians. “I had always wanted to study with Joe Viola, who was one of the great American master teachers of the saxophone. Berklee was more the vibe I needed.”
When he took his degree in 1992, he did not, like so many Berklee graduates, relocate immediately to New York City. “I wanted to go to a big city that wasn’t New York, and Chicago was a place you could play a lot.” He entered a master’s program at DePaul University. By 1997, he was ready to make the move. “I always said I wanted to play with Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette someday, and that was never going to happen if I stayed in Chicago. In the mid-’90s, you had to be in New York.”
Mahanthappa hit the jazz radar not long after arriving in town, when he joined forces with pianist Vijay Iyer. They began gigging and making records, some led by Iyer (Blood Sutra on Pi Recordings; Panoptic Modes, reissued on Pi), some led by Mahanthappa (Mother Tongue, Pi), some co-led (Raw Materials, Savoy). Today, Mahanthappa and Iyer are two of the most respected, most decorated musicians in jazz.
They dominate the critics’ polls in the alto saxophone and piano categories, respectively, and most years appear at or near the top of categories like “musician of the year” and “album of the year.”
Back at the turn of the millennium, though, they were up-and-coming players who were unusual for two reasons: There were few Indian-American jazz musicians, and they played strange stuff. Iyer is an autodidact who has always had his own percussive, polyrhythmic piano language. As for Mahanthappa, when you listen to his early recordings now, he already sounds like no one else. He already has that sublime alto saxophone shriek. His art is already dizzying in its diversity, juxtaposing melodicism and dissonance, formal focus and freedom. In his playing, you hear intimations of many moments in saxophone history, from primary sources (Coltrane, Coleman), to footnotes (Jimmy Lyons, Sonny Simmons). You also hear lyricism in beautiful new jagged shapes.
All the unfamiliar sonorities led many listeners, including critics, to assume that Mahanthappa and Iyer were bringing Indian influences into their jazz. “Not so much,” Mahanthappa says. “I knew very little about Indian music at that time. When I was a kid, my mother sometimes played bhajans on Sunday mornings. They were like Hindu hymns. She had this stack of 45s. But that was it. When I became a musician, I mostly ran the other way. I got tired of people expecting me to be an expert on Indian music.”
But a revelation occurred while he was at Berklee. He went to India to play with a Berklee student band at Jazz Yatra, a festival that no longer exists. “It was my first time in India in over 10 years, my first time going as an adult, without my parents. And I was going there to play music. It was a lot to deal with. I was terrified. I was confronting head-on all these questions: ‘How Indian are you? How American are you?’ It was a mindfuck. Then I went to an all-night event in Bangalore. There is a tradition in India of concerts that go all night, ’til dawn. What I heard blew me away. It was unbelievable. I found out later that some of the greats of Indian classical music had performed that night, both Hindustani and Carnatic. I went to record stores the next day and bought as many cassettes and CDs as I could carry. And that’s about all I listened to for a couple of years.”
When Mahanthappa made the recordings with Iyer in the early 2000s, he was not yet ready to incorporate Indian elements into his work: “I kept thinking, ‘How do you put these things together and still maintain reverence and integrity?’ Because I knew that Indian symbolism and iconography had mostly been engaged very superficially in jazz. For a jazz group to bring in a tabla player did not automatically result in a cross-cultural collaboration. I knew I wanted to create something that didn’t sound like cut-and-paste. If I was going to deal with Indian rhythms or Indian melodic content, it had to be integrated.”
The turning point came in 2005, when he again traveled to India, this time to Chennai, on a commission. He spent time with Kadri Gopalnath, who played Mahanthappa’s instrument, the alto saxophone, but in a style that was decidedly non-Western. Gopalnath employed microtones derived from the Carnatic music of southern India. After Mahanthappa made another trip to India on a Guggenheim grant, he felt ready to record with Indian musicians. The result was Kinsmen, his collaboration with Gopalnath, released on Pi in 2008 to widespread astonishment and praise. Two dissimilar musical cultures, both prioritizing improvisation and energy, meet and commingle organically. Mahanthappa visits ragas and quarter tones, and Gopalnath visits bebop and the blues. They whip all these ingredients into wild eight- and four-bar exchanges and wailing, extended joint ventures.
Kinsmen was important, but it was a one-off project. Around the same time, Mahanthappa formed another ensemble that drew deeply on his Indian heritage, a trio that continues to the present day. Indo-Pak Coalition is two Americans with roots in the Indian subcontinent (Mahanthappa and guitarist Rez Abbasi, born in Pakistan), and a third American, Dan Weiss, who studied for 20 years with tabla master Pandit Samir Chatterjee. Their album Apti (Innova, 2009) expanded upon the cross-cultural explorations of Kinsmen. (They released a second album, Agrima, in 2017, available as a digital download or double LP from Mahanthappa’s website (rudreshm.com) and from HDtracks.com.)
was American Songbook standards and the pop music of his youth. He says, “There was a part of me that always wanted to record standards. But when I was younger, I guess I had a certain agenda, certain ideas and energies that I wanted to get out there in the world. I didn’t want to be just one more saxophone player doing ‘Now’s the Time’ [Charlie Parker’s bebop classic]. I felt like I had a perspective that would not come across effectively if I played ‘I’ll Remember April.'”
It took Mahanthappa a long time to record with Indian musicians, and it took him even longer to record “I’ll Remember April.” But there it is, the seventh track on Hero Trio. When you hear it now, it is unclear why he had once feared that such a song would not allow his “perspective” to “come across effectively.” The perspective on “I’ll Remember April” is radical and personal. It opens with a commanding bass announcement from Franáois Moutin and violent drum detonations from Rudy Royston. Then Mahanthappa fires quick blasts that soon run together into long spilling arcs. It is a rush when Gene de Paul’s time-honored melody clarifies out of abstraction. Mahanthappa hits “I’ll Remember April” hard then spins off it for free, blistering runs, then returns to the song with fervent embellishments.
In our present jazz era, it is common for albums, especially those by younger musicians, to contain all or mostly all originals. But skilled players far outnumber gifted composers. Mahanthappa analyzes the problem this way: “A lot of new players today are coming out of academic settings. There is a kind of unspoken checklist of things you’re supposed to do. One is compose. Everyone puts ‘composer’ in their title now.” Mahanthappa’s exclusive preference for recording original music was understandable in his first 15 albums. He was defending a unique aesthetic position, and he was an accomplished composer. But Hero Trio opens new vistas. It turns out that “I’ll Remember April” does not limit jazz creativity. The opposite is true: The song provides a base pattern embedded within Mahanthappa’s own vast design. He can glance off the form, using it as a touchpoint, a known frame of reference, one resonant with historical associations.
The other covers (if “covers” is the term for such unbridled acts) also lead to inspirations of memory. “Ring of Fire,” with a new beat in the third measure, is the most surprising choice, but Mahanthappa says Johnny Cash was vital to his childhood. Charlie Parker was vital from his adolescence onward. He made a widely praised Parker tribute in 2015, Bird Calls, on the ACT label, but at that time he was still committed to recording his own material. Bird Calls has music motivated by, not composed by, Parker. The decision to record three Bird tunes on Hero Trio is significant. (Besides “Red Cross,” the others are “Barbados” and “Dewey Square.”) Mahanthappa burns these iconic themes into the air then repurposes them in his own vivid timbre and energy. Perhaps the piece that is most literally a cover is Ornette Coleman’s great lament, “Sadness.” Mahanthappa’s version is faithful, concise, and passionate.
Mahanthappa has played with Moutin in various settings for more than 20 years. His association with Royston goes back to 1991, in Colorado. But until the new album, they had never played together as a trio. The saxophone trio with bass and drums is one of the foundational formats in jazz. Trios led by Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Joe Henderson, Joe Lovano (and, more recently, J.D. Allen) are important examples. Mahanthappa, with a few brief, minor exceptions, has bypassed the format—until now.
Moutin and Royston are extraordinary on Hero Trio. Their aggression establishes drama, even before Mahanthappa enters. Moutin reminds you of David Izenzon with Ornette Coleman. Izenzon was the first bassist who proved that it was not only okay, it was levitational, for a bassist to play so many notes, to become a semi-autonomous whirlwind of energy within a jazz ensemble. Mahanthappa says, “I always wanted to make a classic saxophone trio record. And I always wanted to make an album of music that was not my own. I realized that now was the time, for both. François and Rudy and I are so connected. Anything you play with them sounds fresh.”
He explains how, in live performance, the three of them developed a system of cues: “I play a melodic figure that cues a particular bass line, a certain groove. And the idea is that we can vibe on that for a while and then I’ll start playing a tune, a standard, and everybody will kind of fall in. Then I’ll cue another bass line. Let’s say I have six or seven of these cues. You can play a whole set of standards that are bridged together by these grooves. It works really well live. It’s very organized but it sounds sort of stream-of-consciousness. It puts an original light on standards. The challenge with this album was, ‘How do you capture that spontaneous thing that happens live on a studio recording, a five-minute track?'”
“I Can’t Get Started” shows how the trio meets this challenge. A quick melodic flourish from Mahanthappa, repeated twice, indeed cues a groove, an ominous, slow ostinato from Moutin. Then Mahanthappa floats in over the groove. He is playing the alto saxophone, but the sound comes from so far east of Boulder that he might be playing the double-reed shehnai of India. His wavering, hypnotic lines suggest distant ancient ceremonies and processionals. A song by Ira Gershwin and Vernon Duke is transformed. The transformation could only be imagined by someone who grew up in the presence of the American Songbook, was sent on a mission by Charlie Parker, ventured outside of Parker, then returned to where he started, on a passage that included a stop at an all-night concert in Bangalore.
“I Can’t Get Started” is the closing of a circle. Ideally, it would have been a live album. (Surprisingly, Mahanthappa has never made one.) He says, “The original plan was to play a club somewhere for maybe four nights and record everything and then figure out what the record should be.” For various practical and logistical reasons, the plan was abandoned. Hero Trio was recorded by engineer David Amlen at Sound on Sound Studios in Montclair, New Jersey, within long walking distance of Mahanthappa’s home. The upside (as is often the case when weighing the pros and cons of live vs studio recordings) is the sound. Sonically, the album is dynamic and visceral. You are close enough to Mahanthappa’s alto saxophone to reach out and touch it. The mix by Liberty Ellman brings the bass and drums far forward—appropriate given the centrality of Moutin and Royston to this trio’s impact.
You can’t talk to a jazz musician in mid-2020 without inquiring about how the global pandemic has affected their life and work. Mahanthappa says, “This was supposed to be a big touring year for me. I had some major stuff lined up, including a long tour with a project for the Charlie Parker centennial.” (It involved an all-star band co-led with Terri Lyne Carrington and was called “Fly Higher: Charlie Parker @ 100.”) “Of course, everything got cancelled. But I’m doing okay. I’ve been teaching at Princeton for four years now, so I’m less dependent on income from touring. My wife is a therapist, and she has been able to do that from home, by Zoom or whatever. Her field is actually one that ramps up in times like these. I’m more concerned for all my good friends and colleagues who rely mostly on performing. I’m glad that a lot of organizations have mobilized to help.”
When told that many musicians report an unprecedented availability of practice time while sheltering in place, he speculates, “They must not have young children.” (He has a son and a daughter, ages 7 and 4.)
“I imagine the trio will probably do a bunch of touring to support the new album in 2021.” We can only hope.
source: http://www.stereophile.com / Stereophile / Home> Music and Recording Features / by Thomas Conrad / September 04th, 2020
