Quartet Gamak’s unique jazz has a global vibe
Top saxophonist came late to appreciation of Indian music
Rudresh Mahanthappa’s band Gamak packs a unique brand of hot jazz. You get the sense that the New Jersey-based saxophonist is used to explaining how his musical origins don’t follow directly from his Indian heritage. Mahanthappa was actually born in Italy, where his father, an academic, happened to be teaching at the time, and from early on he was raised in Boulder, Colo. He studied music in Boston and Chicago before moving to New York in 1998. More recently he’s become a regular in the jazz polls, including No. 1 alto saxophonist of the year in one of Downbeat’s critics polls.
“I grew up with a lot of Hinduism and Indian food, but my parents didn’t listen to a lot of Indian music,” he says. “Exploring Indian classical music later on was more about trying to define and express my identity as an Indian-American. Everyone assumed I was an expert on Indian music because of my name and the colour of my skin, so I had to find a safe place to learn something about it.”
After growing up with many mainstream American influences and a fascination for jazz sax such that he calls himself “a Charlie Parker-John Coltrane head,” Mahanthappa wound up playing in a student band at a jazz fest in India in 1993. It was his first time in India as an adult on his own. A musical epiphany came during an all-night concert he attended in Bangalore.
“That’s when Indian music all of a sudden made sense to me,” he says. “I come from a jazz background, but I think there’s this undertone through all my music of expressing this cultural hybridity.”
It had a direct influence on his first solo album, Yatra, released in 1994, but 20 years later Mahanthappa’s music and his current quartet Gamak are the evolution of all he has explored. Some of his tunes borrow from the micro-tonal scales of Indian music, but that’s only part of it. “Gamak or gamaka refers to melodic ornamentation as it occurs in Indian music, but I wanted to loosely examine that as a global idea. It’s just as important in R&B or country, or the ongoing discussion of what makes the blues the blues. It’s not bound to any sonic palette or genre.”
For this writer, catching Mahanthappa’s earlier trio at the Montreal Jazz Festival in 2009 offered a certain note of irony. The leader, on alto sax, was joined by guitarist Rez Abassi (Pakistaniborn, but also raised in America). The one American player Dan Weiss was playing tabla percussion.
“It speaks to the global nature of the music, that an American guy from New Jersey can be a tabla master, and that two guys of South Asian origins end up full-on into western jazz as teenagers,” Mahanthappa says. “We’ve always enjoyed that irony.”
In the touring version of Gamak that plays the jazz fest here Saturday, Dan Weiss plays drum set, Abassi takes over from David Fiuczynski on guitar, and Toronto’s Rich Brown plays electric bass, unlike Gamak’s 2013 self-titled debut album. But the band’s unique strength remains in the way Mahanthappa injects his contemporary solo intensity over the band’s tight rhythmic patterns and textures.
“I grew up in the 1980s with a lot of rock and funk,” he says. “The things that made me want to play as a kid were David Sanborn, Brecker Brothers and stuff on the radio, before I ever heard Charlie Parker. So I always gravitate towards grooves. Then it’s a question of what else is woven into that.”
After years of juggling varied projects, Gamak seems to be his most popular creative vehicle.