Crosscurrents

[John Marchioro]

I saw this show last night at Berklee:

https://www.boston.com/event/crosscurrents-zakir-hussain-dave-holland-6830048

A very Indian affair... Perhaps 75% of the attendees were unmistakably
South Asian. Sell out crowd.

My reaction? Hmmmmm...... Well it started well enough. Shankar
Mahadevan (of whom I had never heard before, though Bollywood is not
high on my list of entertainments) sang a beautiful Indian melody,
with Holland bowing a single low note (in the manner of a tambura,
though the tambura has several strings that are played over and over
again to create a tonal backdrop for a raga, and those notes are in a
much higher range as a rule), and Chris Potter interacted with
Mahadevan on alto sax, very nice.... And later in the show there was a
kriti, a beautiful 18th century South Indian song, and even though the
full band played it still worked extremely well as a traditional piece
of Indian music.

But there were other parts of the show where I was PBD (Plagued by
Doubts). Before the kriti, Hussain noted that classical Indian music,
northern and southern, lacks a harmonic element, and is thus the
antithesis of not only most jazz but also Western music in general,
which is based on harmonic progressions and harmonic rhythm, even when
it does not follow the usual rules of harmony as in the case of say
Debussy or Copland or Shostakovich (obviously this does not apply to a
lot of 20th century Western classical music, but how many people
actually listen to such stuff?). And that is true, though one has to
qualify that by mentioning an artist like Coltrane, who increasingly
adopted a modal approach that dispensed with chord changes almost
entirely.... and his offspring, like Pharaoh Sanders and others
(including McCoy Tyner, though most of Tyner's work remained with a
harmonic framework and involved chordal progressions).

But it does not end there. Indian music builds tension temporarily.
But it does not do so by harmonic movement or by a rising and then
resolved melodic line, as in a typical Western composition, whether it
is a Lieder by Schubert, a standard like "You Don't Know What Love Is"
or a modern jazz composition like Coltrane's "Naima". No. Classical
Indian music is based on scales, ragas.... And there are very clear
rules, the pieces start very slowly without any tabla or mrdangam
accompaniment, there is a slow unfolding of the notes of the raga that
slowly builds, then there is a section where there is drum
accompaniment and theme and improvisation by the lead instrument at a
moderate tempo, and then finally a section where the tempo is
increased leading to a rousing finale. That is the typical course of
an Indian raga, and it is rule governed even though space is left for
improvisation by the lead instrument (including vocals) and interplay
between the lead instrument and drums, and even though it is possible
to abbreviate the raga by omitting certain things (usually the slower
first part). And of course there are lighter pieces like dhuns and
thumris and the like, where these rules area often thrown out. But the
key point remains: Indian music does not build tension harmonically or
by a melodic line; it does so by increased speed over time and
increased dynamics.

Jazz does not work that way for the most part. A typical jazz piece is
not that different from any other piece of Western music (outside the
jazz and classical and rock avant garde, that is): Theme, bridge,
restatement of theme, solos, return to theme, end. Sure they are
countless variations, and sometimes soloing is entirely omitted, but
that is the general pattern, and you can see it even in a Beethoven
symphony, though in that case it is done on a grand scale and the
variations are multitudinous.

I think this makes it hard to find a meeting point for the Indian and
Western traditions.... And I think that was on display last night with
cross currents. There are just a few possibilities and other than the
one I mentioned that I thought worked particularly well (a traditional
Indian piece with the Western musicians largely playing in a
non-harmonic Indian mode) they did not sound very promising to my
ears. One was to play an Indian melody with Western harmony, and then
lapse into fairly typical jazz improvisation with chord changes.... I
found this highly unsatisfying when the band did this. it felt pro
forma and it really lacked the kind of internal dynamism that made
Dave Holland's big band and octet recordings (with the wonderful
writing for the horn section, where the horn instruments are divided
up and taking several different parts and playing back and forth
against one other with counterpoint in a really powerful and
interesting way, again and again).... This kind of interplay by
counterpoint simply did not happen last night, and I could not help
but think that it was because Holland did not devote the kind of
effort to scoring these pieces beyond working up some perfunctory
chord changes... Sorry, it was not enough to sustain interest.

Another possibility was just to play straight up jazz. OK, great, but
then you need high quality compositions to sustain interest, and there
weren't any of those last night either.

I hate to sound overly critical here, but I thought last night was a
wasted opportunity. And there is nothing new about any of this. If you
go back and listen to the two Colin Walcott albums on ECM from the
1970s, or some more recent Charles Lloyd recordings on ECM ("Sangam",
a brilliant CD, comes to mind), you can see that other musicians have
tried to square this circle before. Dave Holland was actually the
bassist on those Colin Walcott recordings, so he is not new to this
effort either. And there are also the efforts by Yehudi Menuhin and
Ravi Shankar and Jean-Pierre Rampal, in the East Greets West
recordings (three of them, now long long ago), as well as the East
Greet East recording pairing Indian and Japanese musicians.... And
others like John McLaughlin and Steve Tibbets recordings with Choin
Drolma (Tibetan, but a lot of the above applies to those two CDs as
well) and Don Cherry and on and on.

I was hoping for something new that advanced these efforts at
cross-cultural musical fusion last night. With the exception of a few
brief beautiful moments, I did not hear it.

[John Marchioro]

I wrote:

But it does not end there. Indian music builds tension temporarily.

I meant of course "temporally".

[David J. Littleboy]

>From: John Marchioro

>(obviously this does not apply to a
>lot of 20th century Western classical music, but how many people
>actually listen to such stuff?).

I hear ya, bro. ROFL. When I was a kid, I notived that the quality of the
music was inversely proportional to the length of the introduction. "Here's
a new recording of Mozart's K239 by <whomever>.". vs. a really long blather
on how the composer came up with the idea that the second violins should be
a quarter tone out of tune relative to the violas and which matched the rest
of the orchestra was up to the performers..

The guitarist in that band is interesting: he does some almost Michael
Hedges sorts of things as well as in-your-face Indian**.

*: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5imXhsdlAA
**: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AEjMPukAs4

David J. Littleboy
Tokyo, Japan

[John Marchioro]

Here is something more to my liking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-OSqHAeLBU

And these as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=323BkT6jHG8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9zb3i_qhsA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YXn5MOoz14
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XN4vxZ8gvjY

Great stuff.

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[John Marchioro]

And this as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo7lxXW6tO0

I bought the Concert for Bangladesh with paper route money when I was
12 or 13 years old, and hated the first side of record 1, which was
the above.... I listened to the others on and off, and then at a
certain point around the age of 18 or 19 I decided that the first side
of record 1 was vastly superior to the other 5 sides..... Especially
the first 4-5 minutes of this.

It is an odd thing to contemplate.... George Harrison came through
Seattle when I was a junior in high school, and had Ravi Shankar as
his opening act, though Shankar did not play traditional Indian music
but instead some rather curious modernistic compositions of his
own.... Widely lampooned in the press. Actually, that concert was the
opening show on a 30 or 40 date North American concert tour for
Harrison, and Rolling Stone's Ben Fong-Torres was in the audience
laughing at the Ravi Shankar segment, and Patrick MacDonald (the
talentless rock critic of the Seattle Times back then) quoted
Fong-Torres' disparaging comments about Shankar, and Harrison was
reportedly red beet livid over them when he read them....

Anyway, I subsequently took a course on Hindustani classical music,
and studied sitar for one year under the following Hindustani
classical music master at the University of Washington (with no
results worthy of note, other than the considerable psychic discomfort
that I inflicted on my poor teacher, that is):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zia_Mohiuddin_Dagar

And then I bought a lot of Hindustani classical music and actually
listened to it and learned to love it over the years.... saw a few
concerts including a stunning one by Dagar Sabh at the US, then saw a
bunch of others at Harvard including one by Vilayet Khan before an
intimate audience of a couple of dozen people at Currier House one
afternoon..... and then Ustad Ali Akhbar Khan at Jordan Hall, and Ravi
Shankar with his daughter Anoushka at Symphony Hall one night.....

I love jazz, obviously, but I think that the Hindustani tradition is
best as is, the more austere the better. And my former teacher Dagar
Sabh played a very austere version of that music...... Totally
traditional but utterly brilliant. I am sorry if that sounds precious
or preening or whatever, but some things are best left alone, and
preserved as is without "accretions". Hindustani classical music is
generally one of them, despite the URLs that I included in the last
message. It just does not mix well with other traditions.... It has
its own rules and its own tradition, and it should be left alone.

On 5/4/18, John Marchioro <jkmar...@gmail.com> wrote:

[John Marchioro]

And this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJDJF8eEvfU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXz-AArQEE4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rrpu7dPEZ8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjEk_ucndfY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2oRlmQKVCw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrMSnk8TkOU


I tried to buy Choying Drolma;'s CDs when I was in Tibet in 2009. They
are all banned by the Chinese government.

I saw Steve Tibbetts play live in Seattle around 1980. I have never
had a second chance, but that show (small number of people in a
strange space, like a loft or something, on Capitol Hil in Seattle)
blew me away.

Choying Drolma performed in at the Berklee Performance Center in
Boston last year, but I was unfortunately in Georgia or Armenia
then..... Maybe I will have another chance some day.

I had these two CDs pairing Tibbetts and Drolma, and listened to them
over and over and over again when I visited the Tibetan areas of
Western Sichuan 3 years ago.... It is hard to put this into words
without sounding precious, but IMHO never has music better suited a
landscape and its inhabitants.

[John Marchioro]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8rOPNWanGo

[John Marchioro]

And for utterly brilliant lighter fare:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc0AiBeBS74

I have the ECM CD, and wore it out..... Simply brilliant.

Kayhan Kalhor is playing at the Somerville Theater in 13 days, I will
report back about that show presently.