SARATHY KORWAR
The Rising Indian percussionist taking jazz further east talks conversations, chemistry and Coltrane.
IN 1961, the jazz legend John Coltrane recorded a track called India modelled on classical ragas, which in 1965, alongside the real thing heard on Ravi Shankar recordings, would inspire The Byrds’ ‘space-rock’ masterpiece Eight Miles High. In the half century since, the dialogue between Western jazz and pop and Eastern classical has continued, but the former has always had the louder voice. “Even great musicians like John Coltrane regarded Indian music as just a repository of knowledge they could dip in and out of for inspiration,” says drummer and bandleader Sarathy Korwar, over a herbal brew in Kilburn, London, his home town since arriving from India. “I want to rebalance the scales.” Recorded live with his new band, the Upaj Collective, and released on Gearbox, My East Is Your West is a near-two-hour epic, its 10 reboots of tunes by Indianinspired jazzers (Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, Joe Henderson, Don Cherry, Abdullah Ibrahim) and Indian musicians who crossed the other way (Ravi Shankar, Shankar Jaikishan, Amancio D’Silva) or combined both (Shakti) collectively traverse the rhapsodic, the fervent, the gutsy and the sublime. Immersed as a child in Indian classical music and studying the tabla from the age of eight, Sarathy’s discovery of ’60s rock as a teenager lead him to jazz. The Doors’ John Densmore and Hendrix’s Mitch Mitchell “were my drum idols growing up for their physicality as well as their jazz chops. It was natural for me to move on to explore Coltrane, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis.” Drummer-wise, Tony Williams led to Art Blakey for being a bandleader too, then “coming from India, Trilok Gurtu, who played with Don Cherry and Joe Zawinul as well as having his own projects, was someone I looked up to.” To realise Sarathy’s musical vision, the sound flows from the chemistry of the players. My East Is Your West features a big, fat baritone saxophone, but for Sarathy, it’s about having the right player in Tamar Osborn – “people as invested in making the music as me, who want to contribute to a musical conversation, who feel comfortable in live performance taking massive risks because they have a collective understanding of what this piece of music needs to be.” Sarathy leads with a light touch, “planting seeds” of melody, arrangement or rhythm to set the chemistry in motion. The thrilling results demand to be heard.
“I want to rebalance the scales.” SARATHY KORWAR