But the arrangements do not suggest plain demarcations. The group can groove like a jazz band and play with the metric precision of Indian music.
Kanyakumari (violin), Rez Abassi (guitar), Poovalur Sriji (South Indian barrel drum), Carlo de Rosa (acoustic bass), and Royal Hartigan (drums). The two leaders assembled The Dakshina Ensemble from sources domestic and otherwise: A. The work premiered in May 2005 in New York, where Mahanthappa lives.Įssential to the fusion is not only ingenious composition by Mahanthappa, but also the right ensemble to bring the music to fruition. Mahanthappa traveled to Chennai (Madras) in 2005 to work with Gopalnath, composing melodies that would wed the Carnatic tradition with a jazz sensibility. The two saxophonists met a few years later at a concert, and the current collaboration was born of a commission by the Asian Society. It opened up possibilities for Mahanthappa, who was eager to learn about the music of his ancestry. Mahanthappa first heard about Gopalnath when his brother gave him the album Saxophone Indian Style as a kind of joke after a recital at Berklee. But it is a kinship felt across a significant distance.
Hearing the two men play together, “kinship” is the word that comes to mind. Gopalnath uses stuttering syncopations too, but they are fastidious and clipped, the flickers familiar from Indian music. Mahanthappa, for all his downtown cred and modernism, is still fed by a flowing stream of bebop groove, with stuttering syncopations that trace back to Charlie Parker. The primary difference, at least in the ear of a jazz listener, is in the players’ approaches to rhythm. There is a vast difference between these players but also a vast overlap. How different could their conceptions really be? Kinsmen makes clear that the territory here is wide. Gopalnath is an improviser like Mahanthappa, and they both play the alto saixophone.
Rudresh Mahanthappa, an Indian-American born in Boulder, Colorado and trained at the Berklee College of Music, here collaborates with the Indian “Emperor of the Saxophone”, Kadri Gopalnath on a series of vibrant compositions that integrate two linked but utterly different traditions. Instead, I prefer-wildly prefer-music like the glorious sounds on Kinsmen, a cross-pollination of jazz and Indian music, specifically South Indian Carnatic music. World music, somewhere along the line, started to mean peacefulness and bubbling streams, trance-y atmospherics and eating in the mall at the Rainforest Café.
0 kommentar(er)
