A loose-knit group of New York creative musicians are avidly crossing impressive fluency with resonances from their South Asian traditions. Musical vigor and deep vibrancy drive pianist Vijay Iyer and altoist Rudresh Mahanthappa rsquo;s projects, while Rez Abbasi leads his formations on electric or acoustic guitar and then wields a custom sitar-guitar to cast gossamer overtones on tight, lyric solos. Kiran Ahluwalia, whose music inspired by ghazal song-forms won Canada rsquo;s Juno Award, finds her vocal role in husband Abbasi rsquo;s band ldquo;extremely fresh.
The melody might be played by guitar, organ, or voice mdash;or the voice is supporting the melody with shadowing, or in counterpoint with it. rdquo; Percussionists Sunny Jain and Ravish Momin mesh the Punjabi dhol or tabla patterns on the drum set, yet Momin, at a Park Slope coffee house, declared avant drummer Andrew Cyrille ldquo;my most important mentor. rdquo; And in her band Kaash and Sunny Jain rsquo;s Collective, Samita Sinha swings from Urdu to the medieval tongue that prefigured Hindi, with a ballad in Mandarin and charged English originals that Kaash electro-drenches in drum-and-bass grooves.
Taking on theatrical breadth along with quartet outings like 2003 rsquo;s Blood Sutra and Savoy rsquo;s recent Reimaginings, his duo with Mahanthappa, and the trio Fieldworks, Vijay Iyer stages Still Life with Commentator with hip-hop poet Mike Ladd and director Ibrahim Quraishi at BAM in early December. In his home near Columbia, Iyer said that his acclaimed rsquo;03 collaboration with Ladd, In What Language?, ldquo;gave us the opportunity to work on one line of thinking, like a zone of inquiry: lsquo;What happens with people of color in airports at this political moment?
rsquo; That was my first extended interaction with text; the music became an emotional counterpoint to those poems. rdquo; Joe Melillo, exec producer at BAM, heard Language? and asked for more.
ldquo;That was when the Abu Ghraib photos broke, with that intense devotion to following the story. We began to watch ourselves watching this new kind of reality, omnipresent and sinister, then looked at the history of images of atrocity, rdquo; with one Still Life track conflating the Hindenburg crash mdash;mass media rsquo;s early disaster mdash;and Edward Bernay rsquo;s tract on propaganda. And the blogosphere was providing ldquo;a new kind of gossip and rumor that could take down Dan Rather, for example, so people got excited as if they have real power, with freedom of speech and information reigning supreme, rdquo; though the pocket opera affirms its creators rsquo; suspicion that ldquo;it rsquo;s ultimately still corporate power.
rdquo; The pianist rsquo;s combo recordings hold rhythmic nods to Monk on Panoptic Modes and Sutra rsquo;s play on ldquo;Hey Joe, rdquo; and Iyer credits saxophonist Steve Coleman for galvanizing his remarkable propulsion. When they met in 1994, Iyer was ldquo;researching and delving Indian mdash;especially Carnatic mdash;music, and studying African music. Now I compose rhythmically first; when I improvise, I think rhythmically.
There rsquo;s been a multi-pronged inquiry, from cognitive sciences [in which he holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley] to cultural studies, of people looking at the role of the body.
In every society, we see music and dance; when they don rsquo;t fit together, that rsquo;s anomalous. The parts of the brain that light up during rhythmic perception are involved in motor sequence planning and coordination of limbs mdash;even when you rsquo;re tapping your foot, that rsquo;s proto-dance. Around that time, I also connected with Rudresh; we took steps together, making music as a way of articulating and negotiating our relationships to our massive heritage.
rdquo;
While hearing Mahanthappa rsquo;s fierce dexterity, visceral astonishment gets trumped both by his refined execution and by those lines rsquo; resulting lock in a resonant musicality. Of his just-released Codebook, he chuckled that the ldquo;heady, dense rdquo; material also ldquo;sounds like a boogie song. Indian rhythmic and melodic concepts are embedded in everything I do, but I particularly wanted to deal with cryptography and math, as a way of commenting on technology and pop culture.
rdquo; When they all met in the mid-nineties, Steve Coleman had recorded several tracks of Iyer rsquo;s debut mdash;then told the pianist that, if he couldn rsquo;t make any gigs, Iyer should call Mahanthappa. After duets at a South Asian festival in Toronto, ldquo;I brought him to Chicago, and he brought me to California. rdquo; When both relocated to New York, ldquo;we understood each other rsquo;s melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic language, then got a grant to write the music that rsquo;s on Raw Materials, rdquo; their bracing Savoy release.
Rez Abbasi had never used a singer when he brought Kiran Ahluwalia aboard for 2004 rsquo;s driving Snake Charmer. That lineup played Abbasi rsquo;s recent Zoho release, Bazaar, with a sterling Jazz Standard gig in July. Of his music rsquo;s burgeoning palette, Pakistani-born Abbasi said: ldquo;It rsquo;s difficult to hold a band together mdash;especially when the organ player plays with John Scofield mdash;but we had a year and a half to play between the records, so while writing [Bazaar rsquo;s] material, that potential was in my mind.
I like to shift colors, and color is synonymous with orchestration. rdquo; Abbasi tours with Ahluwalia rsquo;s band; other projects include Indo-Pak Coalition with Mahanthappa and Dan Weiss mdash;who played fierce gigs at Joe rsquo;s Pub mdash;and the Sunny Jain Collective. In the former, ldquo;there rsquo;s no bass player, so I have to fulfill a bottom.
And Sunny writes bhangra-inflected music that rsquo;s more groove-oriented. In both, there is no other chordal instrument, and I rsquo;m virtually always playing. rdquo;
Over lunch in his new Fort Greene rsquo;hood, Sunny Jain, who helped found the collective Brooklyn Jazz Underground (their four-day mini-festival plays Small rsquo;s early next year), offered a historical distinction.
ldquo;Music fused with the Indian thing has been hit upon, with Dave Liebman or Miles getting Badal Roy, but it was just borrowing these timbres from tabla or sitar. Vijay and Rudresh are not playing Indian instruments; the elements come out through melody, or a tone Rudresh might go for, like a shehnai. My approach is through composition: When you rsquo;re ascending or descending, you have to do the sharp fourth to land on the third only to come back up to the fifth, because that rsquo;s the tonal center of this raag.
rdquo; Jain rsquo;s drums resound with the North Indian dhol. ldquo;I rsquo;m not trying to do the tabla phrasings onto drum set mdash;Dan Weiss nails that, and it rsquo;s amazing. I grew up on Bollywood, and on bhajans, religious songs my mother sang, rdquo; and when Jain and Abbasi first played together around 2000, ldquo;he knew a couple of the old Indian themes I was doing, and played them with certain bends and inflections.
With Samita, I have an unrecorded choral section on lsquo;Johnny Black rsquo; (on this year rsquo;s lively Avaaz) that she blows over, but you don rsquo;t set up a drone: The harmony rsquo;s changing underneath her and she rsquo;s approaching it with a Hindustani classical point of view, but in a jazz context. rdquo;
Sinha and her band Kaash released Seep earlier this year with a hot Joe rsquo;s Pub gig, and played the JVC fest at the Blue Note opposite Jain rsquo;s band. ldquo;Few people have trained in Indian classical vocal then attempted true fusion, rdquo; she said.
ldquo;Emotionalism is the raw power of Indian music: Over thousands of years, they rsquo;ve done serious work on melody, rdquo; she laughed. Utilizing raga melodies, Sinha rsquo;s music ldquo;carries the meaning, and the lyrics are supports rdquo; that she approaches with a bare and exacting voice. ( ldquo;Samita draws on a wide bag of things, rdquo; as Jain says: ldquo;jazz, R B, cabaret, Hindustani classical rdquo;) Recommended to performance poet Sekou Sundiato by Vijay Iyer, she rsquo;s toured his ambitious The 51st (Dream) State (at BAM in early November).
In an a cappella version of ldquo;Moonlight Sonata, rdquo; ldquo;my voice rises above in the raag, I keep my tonal center, and improvise in sargam mdash;which in Hindustani is do-re-mi. rdquo; Another feature is ldquo;Pure Innocence, rdquo; the vocal layers Sinha loops to open Seep. ldquo;Sekou heard it, so now I solo over four singers, honoring Hindustani music but defamiliarizing it mdash;which expresses the multiple [cultural] contexts I exist in simultaneously.
rdquo;
For Climbing the Banyan Tree (Clean Feed), Ravish Momin rsquo;s Trio Tarana melded the leader rsquo;s bold drumming with the bass and oud of Shanir Blumenkranz and Jason Kao Hwang rsquo;s fierce violin. ldquo;The music rsquo;s based on interpretations of Indian and Asian traditions, channeled through our collective influences and jazz improvisation. I lived in Bahrain, Kuwait, in Hong Kong and different parts of India and the U.
S., and all those amazing rhythms resonated with me while growing up. Working with Jason Hwang was another element; people like Jason and Fred Ho played with Henry Threadgill and William Parker while laying the groundwork for the Asian-American musical thing mdash;that coinage didn rsquo;t exist prior to those guys.
rdquo;
War is not our way of life.
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David Levi Strauss is the author of Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (2003), The Fighting Is a Dance, Too: Leon Golub Nancy Spero (2000), Between Dog Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (1999), Broken Wings: The Legacy of Landmines (1998) and a book of poems, Manoeuvres (1980).
His essays and reviews appear regularly in Artforum and Aperture and he has written exhibition catalogues and monographs on the work of numerous artists, including Martin Puryear, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Carolee Schneeman, Alfredo Jaar, Miguel Rio Branco, Mike Bidlo, Raoul Hague and Robert Frank, Tim Davis, and Daniel Martinez.
David studied poetics at New College in San Francisco, is a founding editor of ACTS: A Journal of New Writing (1982 ndash;90) and editor of A Book of Correspondences for Jack Spicer (1987). He was also a recipient of the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in writing in 2003 ndash;04 and is on the faculty of the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture at Bard College.
Read his lastest article rdquo; ldquo; in the current issue of The Brooklyn Rail.
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