Going Carnatic on Coltrane

On a recent trip to Delhi, composer-saxophonist-improviser Rudresh Mahanthappa talked about why jazz is anything but definitive
It’s hard to pin down the ‘jazz’ Rudresh Mahanthappa plays. But he’s okay with that. In an age when critics are only too keen to slot every musician into a genre, the work of this alto-saxophonist and composer — all New York swagger, and brimming with subversive twists and conspiratorial turns — is the perfect comeback to those who over-intellectualize music.“I don’t know what understanding jazz really means,” he says. “You just take what you want from the music and enjoy it, whether it’s the fire of it, or the energy, or the delicacy of it. What is there to understand? Just listen!”
Mahanthappa was in Delhi for the Jazz Utsav; his third visit to India after 1998. On the road since October, Mahanthappa and band-mates Dan Weiss (drums) and Rich Brown (bass) played an incredibly tight set, but allowed each other space to stretch out. Their music had a stormy menace; it had edge and spark.
This is how Mahanthappa sees jazz: At its core, it is music that’s truly American. It’s a hybrid, multicultural, cross-pollination between Western classical, Cuban and African. It’s music that’s always updating, whose identity is defined in new surroundings.
He should know, he has had a hand in inflecting it with Carnatic influences. Yet there was a time when he didn’t want to go anywhere near Indian music. “The problem was that non-Indians often assumed I was an expert on Indian music because of my name and the colour of my skin. For a long time it was such a burden to bear that I avoided listening to Indian music, because I felt like I had to know something about it even though no one had taught me anything. But then when I started thinking more about it, I treated it the way I treated jazz, where I would try to learn from albums and figure out their structures in an informal way.”
Mahanthappa’s friendship with Kadri Gopalnath, the man who introduced the saxophone to Carnatic music, shaped him musically and personally. “When I was on my Guggenheim Fellowship, I hung out with Kadri for a month. I went to his house, and we would work on a different raga every day. We had already made an album together (‘Kinsmen’, 2008). With someone like Kadri, who respected me as a musician, I could say ‘let’s work on this today’. And we’d try to play it, whatever raga. He knew I was going to take the information and do something else with it,” he says.
The musician says many of his fans are not necessarily jazz lovers but they like what he does, and that’s more important to him. “It’s not important to me that they know who Charlie Parker and John Coltrane are,” says Mahanthappa. “I think that’s why the album with Kadri was so successful. It reached a whole other section that has nothing to do with jazz.”
The innovator would next like to take a stab at making music for children (he’s father to a 3-year-old). “There are people making amazing original children’s music. There are rock bands for kids, and the compositions are amazing. I have an idea to do something with songs that are currently in children’s TV shows — not the theme song but something that recurs within the show. Maybe soon…”