JazzTimes: Chucho Valdés: Looking Back & Taking Stock

The Cuban pianist and composer reflects on his whirlwind life in music

01/14/11

Fernando Gonzalez

It’s tempting to hear Chucho’s Steps (4Q), the Grammy-nominated new album by Cuban pianist, composer and bandleader Chucho Valdés, as a memoir of sorts. After all, Valdés turned 69 on Oct. 9, and the image on the cover, not to read too much into it, depicts him approaching a crossroads.

His group on the album—his working quartet augmented here with sax, trumpet and percussion—evokes the sound, and brings back some of the material, of Irakere, the extraordinary Grammy-winning Afro-Cuban jazz-rock group Valdés co-founded in 1972. The music brims with energy and virtuosity as it elaborates on some of Valdés’ familiar musical interests. Some references are explicit, like naming his group the Afro-Cuban Messengers, or using titles such as “Zawinul’s Mambo”; “Julián,” named after Valdés’ 3-year-old son; or “New Orleans,” a tribute to the Marsalis family. Others titles are more oblique, like “Begin to Be Good,” “Both Sides,” “Yansa” or the title track.

All of it suggests an artist looking back and taking stock. “No, there was no plan, nothing premeditated about it,” Valdés says by phone from his home in Havana. “Those pieces came out spontaneously. It’s the kind of thing that happens as one creates. You write, work on the pieces and, as you do, they suggest other ideas. And I feel that’s the best way, because spontaneity is part of this music.” Still, be it by chance or by design, Chucho’s Steps tells a story.

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Jesús Dionisio “Chucho” Valdés was born in Quivicán, a town south of Havana, Cuba. He is the son of pianist and bandleader Ramon “Bebo” Valdés, a central figure in the golden age of Cuban music in the 1940s and ’50s, and a crucial musical influence for Chucho.

As the story goes, Chucho was a prodigy who was playing by ear at the age of 3. A popular anecdote, cited by author Nat Chediak in his Diccionario de Jazz Latino, finds Bebo using Chucho to play a trick on a friend, the late Israel “Cachao” Lopez. Bebo asked Lopez to turn his back to a nearby piano and, as Chucho played, check out “a young North American pianist.” Chucho was then 4 years old.

By the time Chucho was 16, the elder Valdés was leading Sabor de Cuba, one of the nation’s epochal big bands, and brought the young pianist into the orchestra. It was extraordinary on-the-job training for a budding musician. “[My father] taught me everything about Cuban music, South American music, jazz and how to work with an orchestra,” Chucho reminisces. “He gave me the piano chair and stayed as director, so I could learn how to work under a conductor. We did our shows and a million other things with that orchestra, including accompanying shows at the Havana Hilton. I learned a lot there. And with [Bebo] I learned to orchestrate, because he is a master at that.” Chucho pauses. “He was my teacher. He still is.”

Some of those early family scenes are evoked on the new album’s fourth track, “Begin to Be Good.” “That piece has to do with the famous ‘Begin the Beguine,’” says Chucho. “The rhythm is beguine, but it’s ‘Begin to Be Good’ because we used to listen to ‘Lady Be Good’ all the time. That was the music we heard at home. On the radio we had the privilege to hear the Glenn Miller band, Art Tatum, who was my dad’s idol along with Bud Powell and Monk. My dad was un bebocero del carajo [a hell of a bebopper].” He breaks into a laugh.

Bebo was also pianist, house arranger and musical advisor at Tropicana, the legendary Havana club that came to symbolize the golden age of Cuban music and nightlife throughout the world. At Tropicana, Chucho was able to study American jazz greats up close. “I heard people like Milt Jackson, Sarah Vaughan, Nat King Cole and Buddy Rich,” he says. “And that was not on the radio; that was right there in front of me. In fact, I heard Nat playing so much piano that I liked him better as a pianist than as a singer. And then there were the jam sessions my dad took me to when I was 8 or 9, when he would play with guys like Stan Getz and Zoot Sims. For the American musicians, Havana was just a skip and jump from Miami.”

The family story, and Chucho’s world in particular, was shattered when Bebo, in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, left for Mexico in October of 1960. “Things got very bad,” Bebo explained some years ago. “People could not go to Tropicana because of the bombs; cars were set on fire. They even put a bomb inside Tropicana and a woman lost an arm.” The senior Valdés, now 92, has not returned to Cuba since. (Today he is fully retired and splits his time between Stockholm and Málaga, Spain. He was unavailable for interviews.) Chucho was 19 and, nearly overnight, lost his father and beloved music teacher and became the head of his family.

Writer Nat Chediak, who was also the producer of, among other projects, Juntos Para Siempre, the 2008 duets album by Bebo and Chucho, remembers hearing of the great torment Bebo’s departure caused his son. “Chucho has told me how the whole family went to say goodbye to Bebo at the airport—all except him,” he says. “It was just too much anguish for him. Chucho grew up by his father’s side.” Father and son didn’t see each other for many years. 

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Bebo eventually married, settled in Sweden and started a new life. After he stopped touring in 1972, he lived in genteel obscurity, playing hotel lounges until he stopped performing altogether in 1990. In the meantime, Chucho’s Irakere exploded. In 1978, the group appeared at Carnegie Hall in New York City, a performance that would become part of the self-titled release that earned a Grammy Award for Best Latin Recording in 1980. The senior Valdés went to the concert and, backstage, Chucho and Bebo reunited. They hadn’t seen each other for 18 years. “There was never a big fight, some angry argument between them,” says Chediak. “[But there was] a great distance—and a great silence.” Chucho says that the reunion “was everything at once: It was easy, it was hard, beautiful, emotional and, musically, I think it was tremendous for both of us.”

After that encounter, they met again whenever Chucho was in Europe and, in 1994, through the efforts of a family friend, saxophonist and former Irakere member Paquito D’Rivera, Bebo returned to the studio and recorded Bebo Rides Again. The project re-launched his career, and he went on to record several more albums and win three Grammys and six Latin Grammys. Chucho was going to play on Bebo Rides Again, but had to cancel at the last minute due to an emergency tour rehearsal. (He still sounds apologetic as he explains the circumstances.)

Bebo and Chucho coincided later at a D’Rivera show in San Francisco and played two pieces captured on D’Rivera’s hard-to-find Cuba Jazz (90 Miles to Cuba) from 1996. But the father and son reunion became fully realized musically in 2000 for Calle 54, the Latin-jazz film by Spanish director and record producer Fernando Trueba. (A soundtrack album was released by Blue Note.) “Just as in the shooting of any movie, you have the story of the lead actor falling in love with the leading lady. In the shooting of Calle 54, theirs was the great love story,” recalls Chediak, who was instrumental in the project and wrote a book about the shoot. “And, after that, they became two drops of water coming together. There was no way of separating them. For all his recordings and compositions, for Bebo, his greatest creation is Chucho.”

The reunion culminated in Juntos Para Siempre, which earned them a Grammy and a Latin Grammy. “That’s one of the recordings I love the most,” says Chucho. Chediak was with Chucho the night of the Grammys. “He and I were walking after the ceremony, just the two of us, our wives were elsewhere,” says Chediak. “And he kept saying to himself, ‘This is one of the most marvelous nights in my life. This is one of the most marvelous nights in my life.’ He had already won I don’t know how many Grammys by then, but this one was special; this one was with the old man.”

The rest of this article appears in the January/February 2011 issue of JazzTimes

Zoe Keating Legions (War)

Zoe Keating is an exciting new phenomenon, sweeping across the West Coast. Many call her label-less, agent-less existence a product of hype and viral marketing (she has over 3 million+ followers of Twitter, and is a rage on Youtube). However, I find her experiments with the cello very refreshing, truly avant garde, with imagination and talent to back. She's also rated highly in the classical domain. I have enjoyed her style and verve, ever since I was introduced to her stuff by a young intern...

Here, she's doing one of her early recordings, "Legions (War)":

My particular favourite is, of course, "Tetrishead":

Soul(ful) Jazz - breaking boundaries, transcending genres.

Soul Jazz. Not what one bumps into regularly, in conversations or concerts. Jazz for the soul? Of the soul? From the soul? All the above? 

But then jazz IS all the above. All jazz (except, maybe, some). So where does Soul Jazz fit in?

My experience with this form of jazz of music happened like it would for most - through some stellar pieces. Mine was while listening to Mingus, on "Ah um", and getting hit hard by "Better Git It In Your Soul". If you've heard the album, its breath-taking, with old Charlie at his best (The definitive Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD calls this album "an extended tribute to ancestors", and the album was one of fifty recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry in 2003. My favorite, as mentioned in an earlier post, is "Fables of Faubus", but "Better" always intrigued me. It is a very different composition, loud, in-your-face, and the super-charged gospel shouts, Horace Parlan's soaring piano riffs, Jimmy Knepper's gutsy trombone, and Mingus' masterly bass... The composition was also unique, in my opinion, because of the various influences one could discern - beyond the hard bop structure, the bluesy, gospel-y sound was unmistakable...

Here's an excellent piece on Soul Jazz, exploring the nature and form of the beautiful beast. Jazz is often mistaken as without soul, and Dan Bilawsky explains exactly why that is a huge mistake...

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=38186&pg=2

Enjoy...will follow this up with my own take on the venerable Hammond Organ, which formed the back-bone of this genre...

Adrienne Redd (1995): East Jazz

In this article from 1995, Adrienne Redd explores the connection (or influence) Indian music has had on jazz. Interesting read.

EastJazz

Intricate connections, cultural contradictions and coming home: the influence of Indian music in world music genres

"For the better and finer enjoyment of Indian music, Western audiences should forget about harmony and counterpoint or the mixed tone colors... and relax rather in the rich melody and rhythm, and with the exquisitely subtle inflections through which the atmosphere of a Raga is built up." - Ravi Shankar, 1956

Indian-influenced music seemed to explode into western culture when George Harrison of the Beatles studied with Ravi Shankar in the 1960s, but avant-garde musicians and jazz performers had discovered the joy and versatility of classical Indian music long before. World and American music continue to draw heavily from Indian music because it offers potential found nowhere else. Jazz brims with connections and is about picking up themes and improvising on them. Similarly, the few Americans and Indians living in America and playing Indian-influenced fusions are interconnected. Members of this small circle know one another's names and influence one another's work. Warren Senders is one such musician.

With his extravagant handlebar mustache, square embroidered cap, collarless shirt and serious, far away eyes Senders looks like a late-19th century Brit caught in the magnetic field of Asian subcontinent culture. Senders splits his physical life between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Pune, India. And he has given over his soul to Khayal, the vocal style of north Indian classical music, while contributing a bluesy bassline to the ragas he performs with six Indian partners playing violin, bansuri, flute, sitar, guitar, tabla and drums. (A raga is a melodic sequence with a minimum of five notes patterned in a fixed ascending and descending order - the aroha and avaroha.)

Every artist yearns to experience a genre for the first time and to have that intoxicating wave of recognition, of coming home. Senders has a solid background in western music performance, theory and history, having studied four years with a tutor in Cambridge and two at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, but his first reaction to Hindustani music was one of inspiration and passion. "I said, 'God - this is what I've been hearing in my head.'"

He elaborates, "The first piece that really turned me on was a piece of light music for an all-Indian ensemble composed by Ravi Shankar; it featured a vocal interlude performed by Laxmi Shankar. Subsequent to that, the music that excited me beyond all measure was an LP of Bhimsen Joshi performing Raag Marwa." Bhimsen Joshi is arguably the most significant living performer of Hindustani vocal music.

Seeming to allude to Hindu beliefs, Senders says that the first American incarnation of his band, Antigravity, took place from 1979 until 1983. Antigravity included saxophone (Phil Scarff), trombone, guitar, bass (Senders) and two drummers. Senders says, "It was a hot band!" He explained that it then dissolved and reformed, but that the American version of Antigravity is "on the back burner, but I do hope sometime in the next few years to put out a record with that ensemble as well." The current avatar of the band has released a new recording, Boogie for Hanuman (released Fall of 97 on Accurate Records). The CD consists of seven ragas composed by Senders and based on Hindustani religious text. Warren Sender's wife, Vijaya Sundaram, who performed on the first Antigravity CD and on all the cassettes, will also be on the forthcoming CD. She is a sitarist, singer-songwriter and composer who has released several cassettes of her own.

Connections between jazz and Indian music

There has long been a connection between jazz and Indian music. This cross-cultural pollination has lead to recordings, such as Boogie for Hanuman. John McLaughlin, for example, came to prominence as a guitarist with Miles Davis's ensemble, then led an early, and successful, jazz-rock fusion outfit called the Mahavishnu Orchestra. He was at the time a devotee of the Indian mystic Sri Chinmoy, which furthered his interest in things Indian. Chick Corea, Stanley Clark, Al DiMeola and Lenny White formed "Return to Forever", which was another highly acclaimed Hindustani-influenced jazz fusion effort.

Northern Indian music, which sustains notes, while southern Indian does not, seems to be more suited to melding with Afro-Caribbean, Brazilian, North American jazz and other influences. Karnatic or southern Indian music is more a part of everyday life in India, while Hindustani or northern Indian music is of the court and of the intelligentsia, perhaps making it more open to variations and experimentation. Another reason that Hindustani music may adapt to and blend with other influences is that Persian influences were grafted onto the rootstock of Hindustani music during the Mughal empire (1526-1857) when Islamic law was not tolerant of praising other than Allah, so the creative energy of the music had to be malleable.

Phil Scarff became interested in playing Hindustani classical music through his work with vocalist, bassist, and composer Senders, playing in Antigravity beginning in 1980. Scarff says, "At that point, Warren [Senders] had been studying Hindustani Sangeet for several years, and he incorporated Indian influences in his compositions, as well as in his instructions for improvisation. As a jazz musician, I was interested in new techniques and ideas for improvising, and the Indian concepts were very intriguing to me. After several years of listening to recordings and attending concerts, I began my formal study of Indian classical music in 1985, first in Boston, and then traveling to Pune, India." Since then, Scarff has made eight more trips to India to continue his music studies. He has performed Indian classical music, both in the context of his Indo-Afro-jazz ensemble Natraj, and in smaller, more "traditional" Indian classical settings.

He says, " Having been involved with Indo-jazz fusion for 17 years now, I can respond to how jazz and Indian classical music blend: Both musics are deep and expressive, and are based on improvisation. Both employ improvisation that can derive from an underlying composition. Concepts from both idioms can increase the musical vocabulary of the musician and composer, and can be used as resources for improvisation and composition."

The late Don Cherry, the trumpet player who performed with saxophonist Ornette Coleman's "harmolodic" bands, explained that the symbiosis between Hindustani music and jazz comes from the fact that to a greater extent than having notes, Indian music has tones - 36 of them to an octave, so that there is a greater potential for playing "between the notes" and creating what is called free jazz.

However, unlike American jazz, or other western music, Indian music is built around the rag or melody, which the individual artist clothes and makes new with improvisation and variation each time the melody is performed. On the liner notes of his album, Ravi Shankar Plays Three Classical Ragas in 1956, the artist explained the very minor role of harmony, saying, "Indian music is modal by nature, and though harmony may be present in its simplest form, it is inherent, rather than deliberate. For the better and finer enjoyment of Indian music, Western audiences should forget about harmony and counterpoint or the mixed tone colors which may be considered the prime essentials of a symphonic or similar work, and relax rather in the rich melody and rhythm, and with the exquisitely subtle inflections through which the atmosphere of a Raga is built up."

Trey Gunn, Warr guitarist and King Crimson member, talks about these necessary inflections in connection with his sixth solo album, The Third Star. He says, "The influence of Indian music in the west has opened as many doors as it has closed. The new sounds, the sophisticated rhythmic structures and the expansive melodic development all point to new areas for the western musical improviser. However, the 'apparent' static nature of Indian music has often 'given permission' to westerners to do 'nothing' as players, and do it badly at that. (Sadly, I am no exception to this observation.)

"Within the particular atmosphere of a raga, we have a lot to learn. A player can deliver all the elements of a particular raga and get the feel entirely wrong. This has become my latest work as a player/composer: how do define, and deliver, the extremely particular feel of particular piece (even when the musical material is virtually identical to another piece.) The Indian musicians have always been masters of this skill.

"On The Third Star, the first obvious connection to Indian music would be through the sounds, then through the rhythms of the recording -- the droning tones, reminiscent of the tamboura, and soothing slow melodies conjuring the introductory alap of a raga. The percussionist, Bob Muller, plays tabla all over the record and his influence on the material is quite considerable. Most notably there are several tihaisthroughout certain pieces. (A tihai is an Indian rhythmic device, used at the end of phrases.) In addition, many of the pieces are based on asymmetrical rhythms, like seven beats. My hope with these 'odd' rhythms is that they continue to lope along within our western sense of groove without attracting too much attention to themselves. I think, that generally, we have succeeded with this."

Phil Scarff explains what convergence is possible between Indian music and jazz. "Use of tension and resolution is important in creating expression and forward motion in both musics. In Indian music, melodic tension and resolution is created in two primary ways: moving from dissonance to consonance with the drone, and by creating lines that move toward important melodic material central to the raga (chalan).

Rhythmic tension and resolution is created by the use of rhythmic patterns such as tihais, nauhais, and chakradhars, that typically resolve to sam (beat one of the rhythmic cycle). These ideas can also be used in [American] jazz and in Indo-jazz. In jazz, tension and resolution in achieved by harmonic movement; melodic movement, moving from dissonance to consonance against the underlying harmony; and rhythmic activity building into an importance beat in a cycle (this is similar to but less structured than Indian tihais, etc.). Indian classical music and Indo-jazz are very compatible with these melodic and rhythmic ideas; harmonic movement can be applied in Indo-jazz."

Sarod player, George Ruckert says that Indian music blends well with other styles, such as jazz, but stipulates, "The melodic and rhythmic repertoire of Indian music is quite vast. Polyphonic music can give us some of the gifts of the monophonic traditions, but has a hard time with the precision of tuning, emotional content, ornaments, improvised patterns, and lack of harmonic rhythms on Indian music. The "successful" fusions are possible in the light-classical realm, not in the classical, where there is so much to learn before playing it."

Room for originality within a structure is another asset shared by both jazz and (Northern) Indian music. Bhimsen Joshi says, "I listen to (my) old recordings to hear what is lacking so I can improve. When an artist starts at the beginning he always copies his guru, his master. After years and experiences, it is not enough. You must have your own ideas. Remaining true to your gharana's style and to what your guru has taught you, you have to infuse your own personality in your own individual musical style."

Some musicians also note the goofiness and great joyfulness displayed by practitioners of Indian music. This comes from the improvisational paradigm of Indian music (something else it shares with jazz) within which, as Senders says the musicians and particularly the vocalists can, "fail gloriously and succeed even more gloriously." This resonates with Charlie Parker's assertion that "If you want to be a great jazz musician, you have to be ready to be a fool. Senders adds, "The great Indian musicians are great chance takers, but a lot of people are so beholden to tradition that they are afraid to go up on the high board and jump."

Cultural contradictions

A discussion of the broad and indefinable genre of Indo-jazz is also full of cultural contradictions. For example, although, westerners are sometimes questioned in the role of virtuoso practitioners of Indian music, these same westerners often describe a sense of coming home to the music of a completely alien continent and culture. Like Senders, bamboo flute player, Steve Gorn had the experience of returning to his beginnings with Indian music and says, "When I first heard it. This music felt like home to me. People in India tell me I must have lived there in a previous lifetime and that makes sense to me. I have an affinity for western classic but this is the music I can speak through. Even when I play in jazz ensemble, I am basically drawing on the Indian material, although I am reframing it."

Phil Scarff comments, "I have never felt any resentment. However, there certainly is a credibility issue. In my case, it is probably more severe than for most Western musicians because I play Indian classical music on soprano saxophone, which is not an instrument on which Indian classical music is usually performed. This aside, I have felt a lot of enthusiasm and support from the Indian community, both in the US and in India, regarding my playing of Indian classical music, my playing of Indo-jazz, and Natraj's music."

Ruckert, adds, "Resented" is not the word I would use. But the fact is that most people think of me as an outsider in this music...and will opt to accommodate lesser musicians from India as both teachers and performers. Most people, even from India, haven't the vaguest notion of what this tradition is all about. It is the same with blacks and whites in jazz (or rather, used to be). It will change with Indian music, too, as more people hear and learn. Curiously enough, sometimes when I play in Europe I am "resented" for being an American - they can be very suspicious of Americans telling them about India (they do not like the third party sources who should stick to purveying McDonalds', for which they are naturally gifted). My wife is a Kathak (Indian classical) dancer - blond, blue-eyed, and very good at it. She really feels the stigma that is attached to westerners and Indian arts, since she is so visually anomalous to what people expect."

Centrality of voice in Hindustani music

One contradiction of Indian-influenced music, according to Senders, is that Americans think of Indian music as purely instrumental. In fact, singing, with all of its potential for improvisation, subtlety and personal imprimatur, is central to Indian music.

He says, "The tamber, flute or sitar don't go to the core of the music, which is the human voice. My understanding is that the voice is central and I discovered that if I wanted to learn Indian music, I must first learn to sing. In the west if you tell someone I'm a musician, they ask, 'What instrument do you play?' And they may ask, 'Do you also sing?' In India, if you say, 'I'm a musician, people ask, 'In what style do you sing?' And they may ask, 'Do you also play an instrument?'"

Yet another connection between Hindustani music and jazz may be drawn between Khayal, meaning literally imagination, and scat, improvized nonsense syllables. In Khayal, explains Senders, "There are words that have semantic meaning but are not treated in a meaning-intensive way. Six words may be sung over two minutes of tonal space. The vowels are open and the words are varied. Indians may also improvise on syllables and there are also nonsense songs with meaningless vocal components."

Senders says it is a cultural fluke that Americans perceive Indian music as predominantly instrumental. That may be because of the prominence of the instrumental Indian musican Ravi Shankar, with whom many Americans are familiar. Equally important, however is his brother-in-law, Ali Akbar Kahn. The two were disciples of the same teacher. Khan came to California in 1965, moved the school to Marin County a few years later, and it has operated there ever since. Khan teaches the traditional music to students vocally (all the serious students study vocal music) as well as sarod (his instrument), sitar, violin, flute, guitar, sarangi, and whatever instrument they choose.

Getting below the surface

Classical Indian musicians and performers who blend eastern and western influences study for decades, and seem to resent both dilettante listeners and dabbler musicians. Senders has now been studying Indian classical music for twenty years, and while highly respected, acknowledges that he is a relative youngster and must dedicate himself to further study. Phil Scarff says, "For the typical listener it takes several years of listening to recordings and attending concerts to get below the surface texture of the music. Of course, it depends on the cultural background of the listener. One brought up in India would not need so much time; but one brought up in the West, and generally not exposed to Indian classical music would need significantly more time. I believe that one's exposure to a particular culture and music throughout life, especially early life, plays a major role in one's ability to appreciate a particular type of music.

Ruckert tells his MIT students, "The first four listens through the assigned piece (Western or Eastern, African, or Indian...whatever) are for acquaintance purposes only. Real knowledge of the music comes with the fifth time through and after. Music, especially if it is unfamiliar, takes repeated hearings to become familiar with the idiom, intent, mood, rhythm, length, etc."

Phil Scarff says that the basic trends in appreciation and performance of classical Indian music in the United States are that Indian classical music in the US tends toward shorter concerts and shorter renditions of ragas, compared to performance practice in India. He adds, "There seems to be more audience appreciation of instrumental rather than vocal music in the US. This trend may be working its way into the younger audiences in India, as well. The "flashier" instrumental music seems to have still more appeal in the US."

Senders talks about several landmark albums in Indo-jazz by tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, violinist, L. Shankar, ghatam (clay pot) player, Vikku Vinayakraman and Jody Stecher, who studied in India with rudra-veena player Z.M. Dagar. As is the case for Scarff, "flashy" is not, for him, a complimentary adjective. Senders comments that Shakti, the group that Hussain formed, produced "records [that] by and large have weathered well. He adds, "The music was acoustic, well balanced and highly virtuoso. Its downside was that it was if anything too much a virtuoso high-wire act that showcased more the dazzling technique of the participants than any particular innovations of structure or concept. In fact Shakti's music qua music was very similar structurally to traditional Karnatic (South Indian classical). Some of their pieces were in fact adaptations of traditional Karnatic pieces (for which, curiously enough, John McLaughlin and Shankar took composer credit). They are excellent records for the most part, though heavy on flash and dazzle."

In spite of the work it demands, there seems to be a growing appreciation of Indian and particularly Indian-influenced music. Part of the reason for this is the popularity of Indian cinema and its fusion music, which is relatively well regarded by serious musicians. Classical Indian music itself has survived the rise and fall of empires and perhaps its adaptability and openness to new interpretations will allow it live on, in traditional as well as fresh and risk-taking new forms.

- Adrienne Redd

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Below is a partial discography of Indian-influenced fusion or Indo-jazz mentioned or recorded by musicians quoted here. Allen Lutins has compiled a more complete list to be found atwww.lutins.org/indyjazz.html

Antigravity, the Pune group

• Antigravity: The Music of Warren Senders - Accurate AC-4307
• Wings and Shadows: Warren Senders and Steve Gorn - Bamboo Ras BRQ-5339
• Antigravity: Boogie for Hanuman to be released September 1997, Accurate Records
• Making Music by Zakir Hussain (ECM Records) : tabla, percussion,voice / Hariprasad Chaurasia: flutes / John McLaughlin: acoustic guitar / Jan Garbarek : tenor, soprano saxophones. Comments Steve Gorn, "They found some beautiful things there"
• Asian Journal (Music of the World J-101) by Steve Gorn: saxophone, Indian bamboo flute (bansuri)/ Nana Vasconcelos: Brazilian percussionist / Badal Roy: tabla / Mike Richmond: bass. Says Gorn, "It was presented in a jazz context, in that it is improvisatory and the interaction is a jazz interaction."
• Rasa (1982), a collaboration between guitar picker Jody Stecher and sitarist Krishna Bhatt tends to be listed as folk music. It is currently out of print.
• Journey by Ali Akbar Khan (Triloka): sarod /Swapan Chaudhry, tabla/ Jai Uttal, keyboards & others
• Natraj: The Goat Also Gallops originally released by Accurate Records, 1990 (no longer available on Accurate) reissued by Dorian Discovery, 1994. It features Phil Scarff - soprano saxophone, axatse, gankogui; Mat Maneri - five-string electric violin, axatse; Michael Rivard - acoustic bass, gankogui, kidi Jerry Leake - tabla, naqqara, cymbals, gongs, temple block, voice; Simone Haggiag - congas, bongos, tambourine snare, tom-toms, talking drum, cymbals, cowbells, gongs, naqqara, bell trees, wood blocks, gankogui accompanied by Warne Russell - tamboura
• Natraj: Meet Me Anywhere was released by Dorian Discovery, 1994. Phil Scarff - soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone, axatse, voice, tamboura; Michael Rivard - acoustic bass, axatse, voice; Jerry Leake - tabla, clay drum, riq, tar, glockenspiel, maracas, naqqara, gankogui, temple blocks, stick, Tibetan bell, voice; Russ Gold - congas, bongos, tom-toms, cymbals, cowbells, wood blocks, gankogui, naqqara with special guests: Mick Goodrick - guitar; Steve Gorn - bamboo flute; Godwin Agbeli - kidi, atsimevu with Warren Senders - voice
• Natraj has a third album recorded whose release date is TBA. On it Phil Scarff plays soprano saxophone; Peter Row - sitar; George Ruckert - sarod; Steve Gorn - bansuri; Brian Silver - sitar; Jerry Leake - tabla Ray Speigel - tabla; Abby Rabinovitz - flute.
• Trey Gunn: "One Thousand Years" and "The Third Star" both available through Discipline Records.
• Ruckert also praises Ry Cooder-Vishva Mohan Bhatt's Meeting by the River, (Water Lily) while Senders, ever the curmudgeon, comments, "I know of the recording and have heard it once or twice. It struck me as a fairly simplistic collaboration; evidently they had no time for rehearsal and simply played their favorite lines for one another. To my ears it is a rather 'easy-listening' record -- very pretty and enjoyable but without much in the way of challenge. Cooder's duet with Ali Farka Toure (the African guitarist) is much more content-rich, as is Bhatt's duet with Simon Shaheen, the oud virtuoso."

The Walrus: Jazz Is Dead? Life After the Death of Jazz

Brilliant piece...love the deconstruction and tongue-in-cheek myth-busting!

The Walrus: Jazz Is Dead? Life After the Death of Jazz

The sound you hear over the bellyaching of purists is jazz’s fresh new blend

BY ALEXANDER GELFAND

A few months ago, I was talking to a bassist friend about the current jazz scene. “Sometime she said, “I wonder if jazz is going to become a purely interpretive art form, like classical music.” He wasn’t kidding.

Every generation of jazz aficionados has included a small but dedicated group of doomsayers who have glumly predicted that the end of the music is nigh. But the jazz community today is pervaded by a general malaise to which no one seems immune. Despite a thriving jazz festival circuit that stretches from Mumbai to Medicine Hat and a recent spate of jazz-oriented albums from pop stars like Rod Stewart and Smokey Robinson, many people feel that the art form has stalled, and that jazz musicians have been treading water since the late 1960s.

Assigning blame for this lack of forward momentum has become a popular pastime in jazz circles. Some point to the dearth of jazz venues where young musicians can experiment with new sounds. Others blame record labels that would rather milk their back catalogues for reissues than gamble on young, unknown iconoclasts. Still others rail against the proliferation of university jazz programs that produce hordes of clones, and the lack of state funding for a music that ceased to be popular shortly after World War II. And there’s always the argument that trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and his fellow neoclassicists have sucked the life out of the music. Besotted by the classic jazz produced from the 1920s to the 1960s, musicians like Marsalis—now artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center and the most famous jazz musician in the world—are routinely accused of devoting more time and energy to reconstructing historical styles than inventing new ones, and of sacrificing innovation on the altar of ancestor-worship.

In Is Jazz Dead (Or Has It Moved to a New Address), the British jazz critic Stuart Nicholson concludes that European jazz musicians, with their plush state subsidies and healthy disregard for tradition, represent the last great hope for the music. By contrast, Gary Giddins, the current dean of American jazz writers, admits to pessimism. “For the first time,” he wrote in a 2004 essay, “How Come Jazz Isn’t Dead,” “a large percentage of the renewable jazz audience finds history more compelling than the present, and young musicians, who once aimed above all else for an original voice, are now content to parrot the masters.”

For the first fifty years or so of its history, jazz underwent such regular and significant change that the music itself served as a trope for progress and modernity. By the late 1920s, trumpeter Louis Armstrong had taken the collectively improvised polyphony of early New Orleans jazz and turned it into a soloist’s art. Soon after, swing-era musicians expanded the music’s harmonic palette while introducing ever more sophisticated techniques of arrangement and orchestration. The 1940s saw the birth of bebop, a radically disruptive movement led by saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie that rendered jazz more dissonant, more virtuosic, and less dancer-friendly than ever before. And the 1950s witnessed simultaneous efforts to extend and retrench the harmonic complexity of the music, resulting in both the furious chordal assault of John Coltrane’s Giant Steps and the expansive modal jazz of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue.

Taylor

By the early 1960s, however, jazz had entered a phase from which it has yet to recover. Musicians like pianist Cecil Taylor and saxophonist Ornette Coleman, frustrated with the limitations of conventional jazz, began taking radical liberties with such fundamental musical parameters as meter, harmony, and tonality. The resulting music, known as free jazz, inspired considerable controversy. Fans, critics, and musicians all debated whether music that differed so substantially from what had come before—that did not necessarily swing, or allude to the blues, or possess the kind of melodic, formal, and temporal coherence normally associated with jazz—was, in fact, jazz at all (or music, for that matter).

Nonetheless, many of the freedoms introduced by the avant-garde in the 1960s were rapidly assimilated into the mainstream. And therein lies the crux of the problem facing today’s jazz musicians: the last great expansion in the basic vocabulary of the music took place over thirty years ago, when a generation of performers wedded the free-ranging approaches of Coleman, Taylor, and others with more conventional techniques. Since that time, a number of influential stylists have graced the scene, but it has become increasingly difficult for jazz musicians to say anything shockingly new. Jazz may no longer be capable of producing revolutionary movements. After decades of tumult, the recent lack of upheaval feels an awful lot like stagnation.

Classical music faced a similar impasse in the 1950s. Reacting against the rigid academic determinism of modernist composition, composers like John Cage and Morton Feldman defied every convention. Ultimately, their experimentation with “chance procedures—“making music by rolling dice— didn’t just result in new and interesting combinations of sounds; it also ensured that merely being transgressive would never again serve as a guarantee of originality. Once you’ve broken all the rules, continuing to break them is no longer a very big deal.

Glasper

Contemporary jazz musicians find themselves in a similar quandary. As the pianist Robert Glasper says, “You can’t push harmony any further without it being free jazz—and that’s old.” Of all the challenges currently facing jazz, this is the big one—because it is aesthetic and therefore not easily resolved, and because it calls into question the very notion of what jazz is. What becomes of a musical tradition whose very essence has been pegged to modernity when modernity is no longer easily defined.

If jazz is going to remain something other than a sacred relic venerated by a coterie of acolytes, musicians must find a way to breathe fresh life into the music while simultaneously broadening its appeal. Fortunately, some are already recognizing that they are by no means restricted to rummaging around in their own well-trodden backyard for inspiration. There is a wide world of music out there from which to beg, borrow, and steal ideas, and the most adventurous jazz musicians are doing just that. In the process, they are reclaiming the inclusive ethos that once lay at the heart of the music.

Ever since the pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton first spoke of a “Spanish tinge—“Cuban rhythmic flavour —in early New Orleans jazz, critics and historians have made a point of the music’s polyglot tendencies. The very first jazz recordings reveal a music stitched together from European marching-band music, ragtime, and the blues, while the beboppers of the 1940s indulged a taste for Afro-Cuban rhythms that ultimately begat Latin jazz. Yet bebop also fostered a puritanical strain of modernism that encouraged successive generations of musicians to shun other, less sophisticated genres. As the jazz world became increasingly insular and partisan, efforts to combine jazz with more popular forms like rock in the 1960s and 1970s were hotly contested, and often rejected outright. In recent years, the pendulum has swung decisively in the opposite direction. Never before have so many jazz musicians been actively involved in mining so many musical veins with such apparent ease and sophistication. Never before, of course, have musicians and their audiences had such unfettered access to so many different kinds of music. Walk into one of New York City’s more adventurous jazz clubs and chances are good that the music you’ll hear will sound a great deal like something other than jazz—be it hip hop, electronica, or world music.

“We’re far from seeing the end of all these fusions,” says André Menard, co-founder and artistic director of the Montreal Jazz Festival, the largest jazz festival in the world and one of the most consistently adventurous. “It’s a reflection of the era, and it’s only natural that it would accelerate thanks to the availability of music, the immediacy of its creation, and the way that you can now broadcast your music all around the world over the Internet.” In short, hybridization and cross-pollination have become the way of the world. “If you listen to contemporary pop music, that’s just the way that music is made now,” notes trumpeter Dave Douglas. “There are constant references being made to all kinds of music. In a way, jazz is just catching up.”

Douglas

Douglas himself was an early exponent of jazz without borders. In the early 1990s, he sparked a fad by fusing jazz with Balkan music; as a founding member of saxophonist John Zorn’s Masada Quartet, he helped mate modern jazz with Jewish music; and he has had a long-standing interest in combining jazz improvisation with twentieth-century classical music. “So many of us are looking for a new vocabulary and new sounds—just as the beboppers were, and the sixties avant-garde,” he says. “It’s all a part of trying to grow the music.” 

Douglas’s most recent project, Keystone, blends jazz with electronica. In a recent performance at Carnegie’s hip new Zankel Hall, drummer Gene Lake set down the stuttering rhythms of techno and funk; Adam Benjamin generated all manner of freaky space-gun sounds with his Wurlitzer keyboard; turntablist DJ Olive spun, scratched, and beat-matched to his heart’s content; and Douglas and saxophonist Marcus Strickland improvised at length over the ensuing musical stew. The members of Keystone have played with everyone from Ornette Coleman to modern soul artist D’Angelo, and they bring that collective experience to bear in every bar of their music.

Younger players like Robert Glasper, twenty-seven, are achieving an even subtler rapprochement between jazz and contemporary pop music. On his recent Blue Note release, Canvas, Glasper rarely uses electronics, and his melodic and harmonic language comes straight out of the modern jazz piano tradition. His rhythmic orientation, on the other hand, and the forms he gives to his compositions, are deeply marked by hip hop. A typical Glasper tune loops and repeats in ways that are more neo-soul than neo-bop, and his solos have the kind of slippery, elusive feel with which the best DJs flavour their work. Moreover, his drummer and bassist slip easily between swing and the furious, interlocking patterns of drum “n’ bass. They are not alone: many young rhythm-section players have become adept at reverse-engineering the computer-generated patterns that lie at the heart of contemporary pop by playing them on acoustic instruments. Like Douglas, Glasper sees his willingness to reference other genres as something that links him to, rather than distances him from, his forebears. “They touched on what they had, but now we have so much more music to influence us than they had back in the day,” he says. “If Coltrane were around today, he’d be doing the same thing.”

Both men’s music defies easy categorization. Is this stuff jazz, or hip hop, or something in between Questions like this are becoming increasingly irrelevant, as musicians and audiences grow ever more inclined to accept musical miscegenation as a way of life and taxonomical exercises become confined to the radical fringe. Most audiences, particularly young ones, simply respond to what they like, regardless of what it’s called. During a recent appearance at New York’s Knitting Factory, a club that has largely abandoned jazz programming in favour of broader alternative-music fare, Glasper and his trio had the crowd whooping and hollering with an enthusiasm rarely seen at jazz shows. And Keystone filled Zankel with the kind of twenty- and thirty-something audience that more conventional jazz acts no longer attract.

A member of the jazz police might question whether all of this is really part of “the tradition” (if that tradition is taken to be swinging 4/4 jazz with an emphasis on ballads, blues, and standards). Yet there’s more to the tradition than a received repertoire or a specific set of musical devices; there’s also a commitment to exploration, experimentation, and adventure. “To me, it’s all about trying to pay homage to jazz as a progressive music,” says Douglas. “Learning the music of Thelonious Monk and Eric Dolphy and Woody Shaw was all about learning this cutting-edge stuff. I’ve looked toward the Balkans, toward klezmer, toward contemporary classical music for the same reason. Working with electronics is just another way of getting at something new and different.”

The same might be said of recent attempts to combine jazz with various forms of world music. Much is made of the way in which American music and culture have spread around the world like some kind of post-colonial plague. But the same global marketplace that has allowed jazz to colonize musical ecosystems from Norway to Benin has also allowed music from the far corners of the world to appropriate jazz. The routes of musical exchange have become so complicated, and personal and cultural identity so densely layered, it’s virtually impossible to keep track of who’s playing what.

Alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa’s parents, for example, emigrated from Bangalore to the US, where Mahanthappa grew up with little connection to his Indian heritage. Nonetheless, while attending Berklee College of Music in Boston, he became fascinated by Indian music. For the past several years, he and pianist Vijay Iyer have cunningly applied Indian musical techniques to jazz, often in ways so sophisticated as to be barely audible.

Iyer and Mahanthapa

Mahanthappa’s latest project, the Indo-Pak Coalition, takes Indo-jazz fusion to an altogether different level. At its debut performance this past January at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan, the group played selections from Mahanthappa’s recently completed Apti suite. The name Apti, which means “coming together” or “gathering” in Sanskrit, proved to be particularly appropriate. Whether composed or improvised, Mahanthappa’s unmistakably jazzy melodies were dressed in the structures and forms of Hindustani classical music. As Mahanthappa soloed, tabla player Dan Weiss played brisk rhythms called thekas, and guitarist Rez Abbasi improvised melodic ostinatos known as lahras. At times, it was hard to tell whether the performance was a jazz concert or a classical North Indian recital. And that was the point. “I like the idea of putting this format forward but at the same time saying, “I am a jazz musician, and I’m not going to improvise like an Indian musician,’” says Mahanthappa.

This kind of musical pluralism—a commitment to aural omnivorousness, to embracing what the American composer John Adams calls the “shuffle” sensibility of a contemporary musical culture in which the boundaries between genres are rapidly eroding—lies at the heart of the most interesting jazz being performed today. It also bodes well for the future of the art form. Jazz may never again experience the wondrous chaos of the 1960s, but there’s plenty of energy left in the music. And as usual, most of that energy and creativity are to be found at the margins—margins that grow more porous with each passing day.

Alexander Gelfand is a writer, musician, and native Montrealer who lives in New York.