West meets East in 'Kinsmen' concert

Saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa has built a formidable reputation as a composer by fusing his passions for mathematics and jazz.

On the 2004 CD "Mother Tongue," he translated speech samples and patterns into musical notations, while last year's "Codebook" utilizes number theory and encryption techniques. The distinctive result has jazz improvisations bouncing off or poking through some unusual rhythmic and harmonic structures.

"I can't help but want to be diligent and conceptually sound; my dad is a physics professor, my brother has a Ph.D. in neuroscience and my other brother is a chemist," Mahanthappa said with a chuckle over the phone from his home in New York City. "But it is important to straddle the intellectual and the instinctive; to be smart but also fly by the seat of your pants."

Likewise, the purpose behind his music extends beyond mere cerebral exercise. Born in Italy to South Indian immigrant parents and raised in the predominantly white culture of Boulder, Colo., he inevitably began to use music to explore and stake out the parameters of his own identity. "Mother Tongue," for example, samples voices in 22 different Indian dialects responding to the question, "Do you speak Indian?"

Mahanthappa's current project ups the ante: On a tour coming to Minneapolis Friday, he collaborates with Kadri Gopalnath, a seminal saxophonist playing in the centuries-old Carnatic style of South Indian classical music.

"I'd always been a big fan of Kadri's and drove up to Boston to see him when he was on tour in 2003," Mahanthappa said. "Backstage I gave him a copy of the only CD I had out at the time. I don't know if he ever listened to it; I think he was more intrigued because both my first and last names have powerful meanings in India. And maybe he was excited by a guy playing jazz wanting the influence of Carnatic music."

After obtaining Gopalnath's blessing on a potential partnership -- and a Rockefeller grant to fund the experiment -- he traveled to India for a month in 2004, including 10 days of intensive discussions with Gopalnath that revealed the enormous challenges in uniting their styles.

"Indian music relies on different 'beat cycles.' It's not eight bars of this and 32 bars of that. So I needed to figure out how to write longer forms that can still react to what Kadri does. Plus, every Indian musician has a shruti, a key they play in, and Kadri's is B-flat, which of course is a universal jazz key," Mahanthappa said sarcastically. "So I had to write things in B-flat that don't necessarily sound like B-flat."

A raucous hybrid

To further bridge the gap, Mahanthappa assembled the Dakshina Ensemble, a septet that included Gopalnath's longtime cohort A. Kanyakumari on violin, and Indian percussionist Poovalur Sriji, along with Indian-Pakastani guitarist Rez Abbasi, and the American rhythm section of Carlo De Rosa on bass and royal hartigan on drums.

"It looks like I took a jazz quartet and slammed it together with an Indian trio," Mahanthappa said, "but I wanted to transcend that, and I think we have."

The group made its debut with three shows in New York and one in Philadelphia in 2005. Now another brief American tour has been organized under the heading "Kinsmen/Svajanam," a nod to the common but hardly exact heritages of Mahanthappa and Gopalnath.

While there is no commercial recording of the Dakshina Ensemble, an eight-minute excerpt from a New York gig reveals it to be a resplendent, raucous musical hybrid. The prevailing pulse is both supple and inexorable, similar to Ornette Coleman's Prime Time, with space to accommodate both the keener fervor of traditional Indian songs and the more angular, darting phrases of jazz.

"What's interesting is that the music can't be as complicated as with what I do with Vijay Iyer," Mahanthappa said, referring to the feisty Indian-American pianist with whom he last played the Walker in 2006. "At the same time this band has to be very elastic in its ability to react.

"This ensemble is really about texture and orchestration. We can break it down so that just one or two people are playing. Indian music structurally has an opening period of improvisation before the band comes in and different members of the band are featured. Some are upbeat and really burning; some are introspective. One tune sounds almost like a Carnatic remix, with everything in the background."

Because the Carnatic musicians can't read conventional Western notation and even have a different tuning system, Mahanthappa said that the set list is very ordered, containing five or six songs always played in the same order. "Everything is the same, yet the last time we played, each of the four shows was very different."

Winning recognition

The "Kinsmen/Svajanam" tour is one manifestation of Mahanthappa's burgeoning career fortunes. In 2007, he was named a Talent Deserving Wider Recognition by Downbeat magazine for the fifth straight year, and awarded a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship that will enable him to work on creating another hybrid between electronic music and traditional Indian drum rhythms.

But right now it is the ability to work with Gopalnath once again that has him most excited.

"He's a total character, a fun guy," he said of the Carnatic master who, in his late 50s, is a generation older. "One really interesting thing about him is that in India, you have this lineage; so often you'll see this star percussionist who is the son and grandson of star percussionists; that kind of thing. But Kadri was one of the very first Carnatic saxophonists. He is very much a self-made man. He's told me stories about selling transistor radios 10 hours a day, coming home and practicing six hours, then sleeping and doing the same thing day after day."

Along with Iyer and a few others, Mahanthappa likewise is breaking new ground as prominent Indian-American jazz artists. "What I love about [this group] is that we all have backgrounds that make for such a beautiful hybrid," he said. "I am not Indian and I am not American, I am Indian-American. I have access through my ancestry to South Indian music and have been raised in America playing jazz. It gives me different shades and contours and scope to work, and it means so much to me to explore all of that playing with these traditional Indian musicians. It feels like I am touching my heritage."

SEE A VIDEO SAMPLE

of the performance with commentary by Mahanthappa at startribune.com/a3633.