Jazz with an Indian Soul
Photo courtesy: Harish Raghavan
Harish Raghavan’s work is the first full-band application of Indian classical concepts in jazz that sound and feel natural. Dhani Muniz explores the band’s music and deconstructs Indian flavours in jazz.
The general consensus among the contemporary musical fraternities of the world (cough) is that Jazz Is Back.
Now, of course, these sweeping generalized statements have a way of polarizing people in the know (cough again). Some put their hands over their hearts and open their mouths halfway, all surprised. Back? Where’d it been?
New converts marvel at the wonders opened up by simply injecting some Soulquarian-style ass-shaking energy into this musique once so antique. That old ding-ding-ding-ding stuff I could never appreciate. But this! This has something you can really groove to.
And it always has. Yet a particular combination of social and political circumstances have conspired during these past fifteen years to give this musical anti-form the kind of notoriety it once enjoyed (and occasionally suffered). This time, however, it’s something is wholly different. A uniquely American art has been taken up in India and the rest of the world with a fervour that is undeniable and endlessly fascinating; not only for the interminable flow of new talents from around the globe, but for the emerging gaps and fragmentations of a genre already rooted in deconstruction.
My best friend, a die-hard Tarantino fan, has been telling me to watch the director’s Western opus The Hateful Eight for the past three years. So, two evenings ago, I sat down and indulged him. What I got was not simply a pulp fiction for amateur historians, but a disturbingly masterful three-hour commentary on the nature of democracy and, in the words of academic Hollis Robbins, “a panoramic vision of racial sovereignty undone by random violence.”
Here lies the real connection, the loose spark that moulded the form of conversation we now obliquely refer to as ‘jazz’, the mason jar offered up by America to contain this random violence. That great harbinger of infinite change, Miles Davis, always drew parallels between the music and his beloved sport of boxing, particularly the way in which ‘style’ was perhaps the defining element of both; duck-n’-weave around the ring in one, around the cadences of bandmates and the skeleton of a tune in another. At the end of the day in both, the ‘technical’ side is somewhat secondary to a strong inner quietude and quick reflexes.
This intensely conversational element is the crucial point. Is it enough to simply inject harmonic clichés into a tune to turn it into ‘jazz’? Does playing a swing rhythm magically conjure up the spirit of this music, in the same way that playing a Chuck Berry intro guitar lick does for rock n’ roll? Difficult questions, and ones that I’ve been struggling to answer since first tuning into the Indian scene.
Beginning with the world-music boom of the 60’s and 70’s, African and South American jazz has graced our ears aplenty, so why not another of my native lands? Yet time and time again, I’ve found myself slightly disappointed by the marriage of our classical music and that of African America, feeling a rigidity that simply doesn’t seem to blend with the spirits of either. At bottom this is a rhythmic issue, for the circular beat cycles of Hindustani and Carnatic rhythms possess a natural rigidity, while the polyrhythms of Africa and native South America deliver a looseness and elasticity which—though meshing well theoretically—do not always fit in practice with the former’s breathless tightness. This creates a tendency to fall back on certain harmonic and rhythmic clichés in order to give the music ‘identity’, neo-soul chords backed by odd-beat-cycles, which in turn create new sub-genres that rob individual musicians of opportunities for personal expression.
Born in Chicago, and a mridangam player until the age of sixteen, upright bassist Harish Raghavan is an Indian jazz musician. Based out of Spike Lee’s home turf of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, his 2019 album Calls for Action is a remarkable testament to the existence of that invisible Olympus, “Indo-jazz fusion”. It does not deal in making eye-widening tihais out of “Night In Tunisia”, or feature Carnatic vocalists improvising unimaginably deft manoeuvres over unquantized Dilla-beats.
Raghavan’s work, however, is the first full-band application of Indian classical concepts in jazz that sound and feel natural. The tension between individual rhythmic conceptions within the band is key, of course; the leader’s bass playing strikes a dark and insistent balance between the holistic approaches of Gary Peacock and Charlie Haden, while vibraphonist Joel Ross and pianist Micah Thomas exchange flickers and blocks that simmer like a pot forever about to boil over (it does occasionally). Young percussion wunderkind Kweku Sembry plays with a mixture of exuberance and sensitivity, rarely heard since Jack DeJohnette. But it was the band’s treatment of the bassist’s themes that truly made me perk my ears up at first. The first four pieces on the LP, written by a rather younger Raghavan are in a way the most telling, for they offer a naked glimpse of the musical territory he inhabits, and the varying ways in which the members of his group interpret it.
Is the divide between ‘folk’ and ‘classical’ still too rigid in these parts, to digest a music that is both as well as neither? Is purity still too much of a concern for an art based on friction between opposing forces to truly take hold?
“Intro”, a mood-setting bass solo, flows into “Newe”; immediately we are immersed in this world of ‘Indo-jazz fusion’. The phrasing strict and telegraphic, and it is here that the bassist’s background as a mridangam player comes to the fore compositionally and never quite fades. The strictness of the melodic phrasing is offset and buoyed by the freedom with which it is expressed, a process in which Sembry’s drumming takes centre stage. The crawl of “Los Angeles” captures a thoroughly unsettling beauty, reminiscent almost of its namesake city, in the smoggy shrubland of rhythm that surrounds the heavily-sedated freeway of melody, working its way from top to bottom. The final notes with which Raghavan closes the piece almost suggest the beginning of an alaap.
Appropriately enough, “Sangeet” is the last and most obvious of the four in its subcontinental connections and thus the radicalness of its approach; the melody could well be that of a folk song from back home, but interpreted with a deftness previously-unheard of in Indian-ised jazz ensembles. Halfway through the tune, the whole group hits the gas hard, and the resulting fury takes a few magical measures to whir into action before hitting a peak, then plateauing, peaking again at the instigation of a frighteningly-intense drum solo (played under a unison thirteen-beat phrase of the melody), before finally fading away to nothing.
The rest of the album is likewise utter gold, as jazz critics in America and Europe have had three years to point out in detail. Yet the response from the bassist’s native land has been oddly subdued, particularly since ‘jazz’ has now caught on in India as something interesting and hip, and not ‘boring’ or colonial. I can’t help but wonder why music such as this wouldn’t make more of an impact here, particularly on the burgeoning jazz scene. Is the divide between ‘folk’ and ‘classical’ still too rigid in these parts, to digest a music that is both as well as neither? Is purity still too much of a concern for an art based on friction between opposing forces to truly take hold?
A few nights ago, I awoke thoroughly confused by the combination of sounds that seemed to surround me. Sifting through sheets of sleep, I picked them out one by one: on my right, the sleepiest wedding march I’ve ever had the pleasure of listening to, thavils beating out a lazy triplet rhythm while the nadaswarams keened passionately; on my left, wailing along in an uncanny imitation of the horns, a gang of stray dogs in the empty plot next door; and at my side, a few tinkling notes of piano from a speaker I’d forgotten to turn off. All three somehow converged around the key of G major. I listened for a while before falling back asleep.
“It’s not that serious,” said Miles of his music in one of his last interviews in 1989. “Social music, social sound... There’s always gonna be something like that. They get mad at me for playing the way I do, but I don’t care, because someone always does (laughs).” And the music of Harish Raghavan proves that someone indeed always will.
***
Dhani Muniz is an Indo-Brazilian writer and musician. His writings focus on the subversive elements of human cultures and traditions, as well as the unifying elements of nature. Coming from a broad cultural background, and having lived in New York and Alaska as well as India, he strives to communicate a sense of rootlessness in his work—both in writing and music—as well as to effect a cross-pollination between his chosen disciplines. You can find him on Twitter: @suitetheexpatriate and Instagram: @suitetheexpatriate.
