Brooklyn Raga Massive

★★★★ In D

BRM. DL

Terry Riley’s In C gets its deserved sequel.

Good idea, this. In 2017, the self-explanatory Brooklyn Raga Massive released a transporting take on In C: a version of the minimalist classic reconfigured for the Indian drone instrumentation that had inspired Terry Riley. Riley loved the Raga Massive’s interpretation, and planned a collaboration, but when the date fell through the collective’s Neel Murgai and David Ellenbogen conceived this sequel, In D. As with Riley’s original, In D is built out of musical “cells” that each participant can play in any order – a potential recipe for chaos that somehow coalesces into this beautiful music: steeped in Indian classical tradition, open-ended enough to embrace notes of jazz, klezmer and more, as well as cosmic minimalism. And like In C, In D proves to be a triumph of ornate and intuitive community playing – even though the 25 musicians (including Riley’s son Gyan on guitar) were masked and spaced out in the studio. Ecstatic groupthink can transcend, it seems, social distancing.