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Rudresh Mahanthappa - Kinsmen

By derek ⋅ March 3, 2009 ⋅

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Rubbing collaborative elbows with one’s influences can be a transformative experience for any artist. Sonny Rollins seized just such opportunity in his friendly donnybrook with Coleman Hawkins for RCA. Mingus almost botched his with Ellington on the sow’s-ear-into-silk-purse Money Jungle session. Flash forward to present day and it’s altoist Rudresh Mahanthappa’s turn in the company of Carnatic saxophone guru Kadri Gopalnath. As Mahanthappa delineates in his notes, Indian jazz fusion is nothing new. Joe Harriott and John Mayer took celebrated stabs at an alloy in the Sixties and eccentric multi-instrumentalist Lloyd Miller tapped similar territory around the same time.

Kinsmen does its predecessors better in threading the elements together such that the instrumental and musical seams are less obtrusive and the date feels more fully formed. Guitar, bass and drums join violin and mridangam (South Indian hand drum) in braiding both backdrop and foreground for the lead horns. Guitarist Rez Abassi is particularly adept in his role, using amplification to approximate tamboura drones, picking single notes that cascade like lucid water droplets, or turning to a custom-designed sitar variant for added Indian effect. He and several others including Gopalnath have solo features and these shorter pieces effectively break up the program amidst the longer saxophone-centered tracks.

Mahanthappa and Gopalnath are easy to tell apart, the latter man limning closer to the raga and tala structures in phrasing and possessive of a leathery tone often textured by shivery microtonal slides. Mahanthappa is naturally the “jazzier” and more expansive of the two, his runs frequently clocking dizzying speeds particularly on “Ganesha,” which comes across like Indian bebop through the velocity and complexity of its twining lines. “Longing” traces a ballad trajectory to further delineate the vernaculars of the saxophonists. “Snake!” deals in density with the horns wrapping tight buzzing coils with violin above a roiling rhythm propelled by Royal Hartigan’s drum kit. The set culminates in the quarter-of-an-hour title piece, Gopalnath taking first solo honors in a lengthy tala improvisation, answered in a fraction of the time by Mahanthappa. Then it’s on to a thrilling volley of exchanges punctuated by precise rhythm breaks, the two horns eventually soloing in corkscrews on top of each other. Mahanthappa has hinted at this embrace of Indian influences in his past work with pianist Vijay Iyer, but this set and a companion on Innova constitute full-fledged leaps in the cross-idiom. Funding for both came from a hodgepodge of arts grants and awards. Here’s hoping there’s another round of submissions in the works, at the very least to cover airfare and accommodations for Gopalnath to make a return visit with his Brooklyn-based colleagues.

~ Derek Taylor