To a large extent, my purpose with starting this blog was to explore the fusion aspect of Indian music rather than anything that was purely one genre. Rahul Sharma, who I intend to wax eloquent about in future posts, is my idol as far as fusion experimentation is concerned. But, if you have been listening to the national public radio circuit (NPR, PRI) in the past week, you would have heard by now of Rudresh Mahanthappa, the jazz and indo-fusion saxophonist and of the rave reviews his new albums ‘Apti’ and ‘Kinsmen’ have been getting.
As a fan of jazz in all forms, this fits very neatly with a kid-in-a-candy-store situation for me. [Grinning broadly]. Okay, here goes. I am transcribing and including snippets from NPR’s interviews for the benefit of this post, but please understand that all rights belong to NPR and Rudresh, and please listen to the original interview linked in the post.
Rudresh Mahanthappa
I first found out about Mahanthappa through a friend whose friend had stumbled on the artist’s MySpace page. Being that I distrust MySpace, I didn’t pay any heed. And then, NPR’s All Things Considered featured Mahanthappa in a 8 minute interview, which I heard completely and liked, but not loved. His work reminded me of bebop to a large extent, and the interview featured a couple of smooth jazz tracks, a couple of bebop-style jazz tracks and one track that prominently featured a collaboration with Kadri Gopalnath.
Then I heard this interview on NPR’s Fresh Air (click on the first 33-minute link).
I think Mahanthappa’s style of playing mirrors bebop very closely, although Mahanthappa himself may not call it strictly bebop. Wikipedia defines bebop as,
… a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos and improvisation based on harmonic structure rather than melody (link)
And bebop is different from the kind of soothing, romantic music liberally tagged as ‘jazz’ in India. The bebop style of jazz is fast, staccato, surfs the scale faster and may not sound melodic to someone used to hearing, say, Rahman or Karnatik classical. As a result, this kind of music often tends to be rejected by Indian listeners (I have known a few) as cacophonous, illogical, too erratic, or not melodic and so on, all of which are true and false at the same time. There is a very definite logic and talent involved in each of these notes, and there is a melody. However, we usually identify melody as the slower, readily-palatable kind. And by that definition, it is not completely melodic.
What did impress me most in the interview is Mahanthappa’s ability to translate Karnatik music shorthand into something that Western audiences can relate to. This understanding of Karnatik and Western music reveals the map-view that Mahanthappa has, essentially of the various lanes he can traverse with a saxophone in both realms of music, and that is the real find. [Side note: I found that Mahanthappa teaches at NYU a university in NY. That accounts for his ability to explain.]
Here are some excerpts from the interview with some simple-yet-effective explanations for several Karnatik music terms.
[On Raagas]
My approach for a long time with Indian music, you know when I first started listening, was more melodically oriented and I was always fascinated with this idea of ‘raagas’ which are… in the West they are often simply.. simplistically called ‘modes’ but they are much more complicated than that. They are much more complicated than the western perception of scales because they often have an ascending form that’s different from the descending form and notes sometimes will come out of order.
[On beat variation]
Mahanthappa: …You know, I have this very kind of ‘math-ey’ sort of background.
NPR’s Fresh Air: Did you say mathey? (laughs)
Mahanthappa: Mathey, yes, yes. (laughs). And, I think this idea of permutation is something that I have always gravitated towards. Here you have five notes, how many different ways can you order those five notes, both in sequence or rhythmically or however and create these kind of cells that sound almost like a pin-ball bouncing back and forth between bumpers and ricocheting a different way every time.
There is a little off-topic conversation about IIT, which is interesting as well, then they go back to discussing beat variations.
[Continuing on beat variation]
Mahanthappa: … because this song is actually quite math-oriented but in a very traditional South Indian way. Now you have to understand in Indian music one doesn’t talk about measures like we do in Western music, we don’t talk about 4/4, 3/4, we don’t talk about these traditional song forms, that jazz standards are based on, where its 32 bars, divided into 4, 8-bar sections. In Indian music, one speaks more about beat cycles and number of beats. (…)
So, there are two things happening at once there (in the song titled “IIT”). You can hear the overall pulse of the 8 bars of 4/4, but on top of that, you have this, again it’s kind of a traditional rhythmic super-imposition of grouping where we are going to go 6-5-4-3-2-3-4-5, and if I did my math right, that should add up to 32. So, the kind of auditory illusion is something that’s, there’s the big grouping of 6, and the groupings are shrinking and expanding again.
[On Gamakas]
Mahanthappa: The other main musical issue is that in Indian music you have this very… complex system of ornamentation that again in the West it’s kind of glossed over by being referred to as micro-tonal, or quarter-tones, and it’s much more complex than that. It involves being able to kind of slide between notes, and this ornamentation is.. like you won’t play a note directly on it, you might play just a little bit above and a little bit below, and it is like this very decorative ornamentation of just an individual note and there might be a hundred ways to ornament one note. (…) So, obviously this kind of ornamentation which we call ‘gamaka’, is much more conducive to singing or playing violin or playing an instrument where you can actually slide, and the way the saxophone is constructed it’s what we call a fixed-hole instrument. There is arguably… traditionally, the way the saxophone is played, there is no real way to slide between notes in a way that’s clean. So what was amazing about Kadri initially is that he really figured out how to do that on the saxophone, and it wasn’t a gimmick that he was just playing South Indian music on the saxophone. It was that he is playing Karnatik music at a very high level and it just so happens, he is playing the saxophone.
[On Alaap]
[They play the beginning of a piece by Kadri Gopalnath] … What we heard there, structurally, that’s called the alaap which is an opening solo that’s out of time, you know there was no pulse there, we didn’t hear any drums, and it’s usually something that happens at the beginning of the concert but not necessarily, it can happen anywhere in a concert but it does usually happen at the beginning and then maybe another time and it’s a way of introducing the raga. It’s a way of introducing the melodic content of what’s going to come once … like an actual song or composition it’s going to come in later. And it’s kind of a way of introducing each note of the raga to the audience. It’s a really interesting idea, I think, conceptually, something that we don’t hear in the West. It’s almost like, I’m going to make musical friends with the audience before this concert continues. It’s a really nice idea and it’s something I like to do as a jazz musician as well in my own concerts and in my own albums.
There is more discussion of Kadri Gopalnath’s history with music (his father was a temple nadaswaram player) and his pioneering work in playing Karnatik classical on the saxophone. Mahanthappa also explains the concept of musical lineage, and how Kadri Gopalnath did not have the comfort of following in one, which makes his journey so far that much more remarkable.
Part 2 of this post with audio snippets, and links to my favorite tracks here.
NPR’s Fresh Air Interview link: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101644613
Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Home Page: http://rudreshm.com/
Music This! 