Jazz breaking news: Rudresh Mahanthappa takes Indo-jazz rock skywards at Ronnie’s
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
The claim that a slow song is a soloist’s greatest challenge is a cliché with more than a grain of truth.
Fittingly, the brilliant American alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa imbued ‘Ballad For Troubled Times’, solemnly dedicated to the “innocent citizens of Syria,” with a blend of anguish and tenderness that left no member of the audience unmoved. There was a particular yearning and wrench in the leader’s horn that had an emotional veracity that can elude the most gifted technicians. But arguably the reason why the song impacted as it did was the enormous contrast it struck with what had preceded it.
If the audience swooned to that final piece it was positively switched on and hot-wired by the other edge-of-the-seat material. Showcasing his current album Gamak, Mahanthappa, drummer Dan Weiss, double bassist Francois Moutin and guitarist David Fiuczynski played music that showed how new and thrilling could be the union of improvisatory freedom, pulsating raga cycles and lush, polychrome textures that are at once familiar and otherworldly. Given the excitement created by the pinball effects of 10 or 12 beat patterns, being played – crucially – with the ease of a 4/4, it is tempting to conclude that rhythmic and metric invention was the be-all and end-all, right down to the split second accuracy with which the players conspired to hit the ‘one’. That wasn’t the whole story though. There was also the band’s sheer collective energy, thrust and momentum, which referenced a funk-rock tradition, as well as the array of dizzying sounds they produced.
Fiuczinski’s double necked axe morphed into oud, Spanish guitar, mandolin and cuatro, Moutin was Moog-like in his low register and Weiss, playing a stripped down kit, found a sharpness in his snare and rimshots that, enhanced by his mathematical precision, brought tablas subliminally into the mix. Cross-cultural conceits of a different kind happened prior to the gig. Several previews announced the group as 'Gamek', an irony that would not have been lost on a man as sensitive to ‘Stay I’ typos as Mahanthappa.
– Kevin Le Gendre