Rudresh Mahanthappa brings his Quintet to Firehouse 12 in New Haven on June 5. (Jimmy Katz / June 4, 2015)
MICHAEL HAMAD
12:51 p.m. EDT, June 2, 2015
For much of his career, alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa has explored the various inroads between jazz and non-Western musical traditions.
After winning a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, Mahanthappa studied Carnatic music in India; "Samdhi," his subsequent album from 2011, fused those teachings with exhilarating, electric guitar-driven grooves and laptop textures. "Gamak," his follow-up with Screaming Headless Torsos guitarist David Fiuczynski, detoured slightly into harmonically expansive, largely acoustic small-band jazz that progressed along a similar world-jazz arc.
Mahanthappa's latest album, "Bird Calls," however, finds inspiration a little closer to home: the musical language of bebop pioneer Charlie Parker, who was one of Mahanthappa's earliest influences. On Friday, June 5, he'll bring his quintet — trumpeter Adam O'Farrill, pianist Matt Mitchell, acoustic bassist Francois Moutin and drummer Jordan Perlson, who'll sub for Rudy Royston — to Firehouse 12 in New Haven for two sets of music from the album.
"['Bird Calls'] was such a great divergence from all this work I've been doing with non-Western music and South Asian music," Mahanthappa said. "It was to remind myself and everybody else that I am a jazz player at heart, and Charlie Parker was what made me want to play before I'd ever heard any Indian music. It was nice for me to get back into that space and to share it with others with this album."
"Bird Calls" collects eight original compositions, and each extrapolates some musical element of a Parker tune: "On the DL" is based on "Donna Lee," "Chillin'" flows from "Relaxin' at the Camarillo," and so on. Some pieces, like "On the DL," recontextualize Parker's musical language — infamous for its frantic chord changes, substitutions and superimpositions — into harmonically static, rhythmically charged environments. "Harmonically, in terms of that sort of content, it's probably more like my other albums," Mahanthappa said.
"Chillin'," meanwhile, like "Relaxin' at Camarillo," maintains the structure of the blues, but Mahanthappa widens the spaces between each of its three four-bar sections, requiring a soloist to play a cue (taken directly from Parker's fourth, eighth and 12th bars) to usher in the next four-bar chunk.
read more: http://www.ctnow.com/entertainment/music/hc-rudresh-mahanthappa-at-firehouse-12-in-new-haven-0604-20150604,0,7756130.story
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