Brooklyn Raga Massive’s tour has bit of everything
In the five decades since Terry Riley introduced his seminal minimalist work “In C,” the composition has proven infinitely mutable, standing up brilliantly to interpretations by a 12-electric guitar combo, a FrenchCanadian prog rock band, a six-piano group and an ensemble blending Western and traditional Malian instruments.
But “In C” enters a whole new world when it gets the Brooklyn Raga Massive treatment Saturday afternoon at the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival. Teaming up with San Francisco’s Classical Revolution collective, BRM presents an East/West mashup that reveals the incipient raga sensibility in Riley’s landmark work.
“It’s this epic immersive experience that brings out subtle things Terry Riley was tapping into intuitively or subconsciously,” said percussionist Sameer Gupta, also saying that Riley went on to become a disciple of North Indian vocalist master Pandit Pran Nath.
The collaboration with Classical Revolution, a loose but enduring collective that emerged from the Mission District’s bohemian redoubt Revolution Café, is a homecoming of sorts for Gupta. He got his start on the Bay Area jazz scene in the early 1990s playing avant garde jazz in the Supplicants with Broun Fellinis saxophonist David Boyce and bassist David Ewell.
When Gupta moved to New York City in 2008, he took the Classical Revolution idea with him and launched Brooklyn Raga Massive with sitarist Neel Murgai to bring together a far-flung collection of musicians studying Indian classical music. He credits Murgai with coming up with the idea to interpret “In C,” a piece built on 53 short melodic phrases, or cells.
Putting out a call, they rounded up 20 collective BRM members to run through Riley’s work at a weekly gathering at the Art Café in Brooklyn. Turns out “In C” adapted very well to the classical Indian instruments. Even the composer thinks so.
“We reached out to Terry Riley, who gave us his blessing and said, ‘You should improvise more and bring out the raga space,’” Gupta said.
Saturday afternoon’s performance serves as a preview for BRM’s upcoming album “Terry Riley In C,” due out Oct. 6. The concert kicks off a week-long residency in the Bay Area that continues Saturday night at the Red Poppy Art House, where BRM members present original compositions.
On Sunday, the action moves to the South Bay, where BRM presents “Tradition to Innovation” at the Indian Community Center in Milpitas. Booked by major venues such as the Kennedy Center, it’s the collective’s signature program, designed to traces the evolution from classical Indian forms to jazz innovators influenced by them, such as John Coltrane.
On Monday, Gupta and his BRM comrades team up with Classical Revolution members at Revolution Café, and the residency concludes Wednesday at the Center for New Music with “Raga Jazz Messengers,” a program that highlights the interest in jazz within the BRM collective.
Given the Bay Area’s growing South Asian population and Northern California’s longtime status as a vital center for Hindustani music and dance (influences spread by institutions created by giants such as Ali Akbar Khan and Chitresh Das), the region seems ripe for something like BRM. Just like Classical Revolution took chamber music into cafes and nightclubs, Brooklyn Raga Massive has turned new, often unsuspecting audiences onto Indian music by taking it out of temples and concert halls.
“There’s a scene that’s waiting to catch fire,” Gupta said. “We’re trying to draw light to the tradition of Indian classical music and all of these legendary masters who influenced us. But we’re also super inspired by Prince, Led Zeppelin and Miles Davis. We’ve done a rock tribute night playing Radiohead and Zeppelin. We want to do a Fela tribute. We run the gamut. It’s all about letting the Indian classical music flow.”