Mike Heffley & Rudresh Mahanthappa Interview 6/5/07

Mike Heffley’s interview with Rudresh Mahanthappa 6/5/07

I offer my interviewees for this project the choice between a phone and an email interview. Rudresh chose the latter, supplemented by a phone chat for clarifications.

From MySpace: Guggenheim fellow RUDRESH MAHANTHAPPA is one of the most innovative young musicians and composers in jazz today. Named a Rising Star of the alto saxophone by the Downbeat International Critics Poll for the past four years, #2 in 2006, he leads/co-leads seven groups to critical acclaim. His most recent release for Pi Recordings Codebook (2006) was named one of the Top Jazz Albums of 2006 by The Village Voice, Jazztimes, and The Denver Post to name only a few and received rave reviews from Downbeat, Jazztimes, wired.com and Science Magazine. In Europe, Codebook received the “Choc” (highest) rating in France’s Jazzman, 4 stars in the UK’s Jazzwise, and received the “Bollino di Marzo” from Italy’s Musica Jazz. As a saxophonist, Mahanthappa has achieved international recognition performing regularly at jazz festivals and clubs worldwide. As a composer, Rudresh has received commission grants from the Rockefeller Foundation MAP Fund, American Composers Forum, Chamber Music America, and the New York State Council on the Arts to develop new work. Mahanthappa holds a Bachelors of Music Degree in jazz performance from Berklee College of Music and a Masters of Music degree in jazz composition from Chicago's DePaul University. He now teaches at The New School University.

Rudresh Mahanthappa currently lives in New York where he is clearly regarded as an important and influential voice in the jazz world. Rudresh uses Vandoren reeds exclusively. Mahanthappa is also New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. Info: rudreshm.com


MH Rudresh, first, thanks for your time and attention here. As I told your longtime musical partner Vijay Iyer, this is for a book that won’t come out for a couple of years. It isn’t the journalism of the moment, although when it comes out, I expect to have as updated a picture of your work to that point as possible.

The material already there online and CD is plentiful and will inform my presentation; therefore, I have only a few questions that will avoid re-inventing all its many wheels. They’re conceived only to add a bit of depth and personal touch to enhance the book.

The book is conceived at a remove from the stream of your career (and mine as author). I’m going for a take on the big picture that has me myself at a remove from the swim of the daily news about the arts and artists that I used to keep myself in. At some point, I focused so much so singly on some things that I lost track of others. That includes what you and Vijay have contributed, and what your path has been. I’m coming at this by immersing myself in a catch-up of those things, and working it into my own agenda.

That agenda is to look at the music I’ve been involved in all my life, as you have in your shorter life, for the sea changes its undergone from local-American (read: Europe meets Africa in America) to global American (read: beyond America).

I see what you and Vijay have done and are doing as seminal to that change, and at the core of the Africa-Europe dialectic here, taking it into the India-America dialectic, in as crucial a way as others have taken South-North America, Asia-America, and Russia-cum-Central Asia-cum-Indonesia-cum-Native America-cum-Eastern-Europe-America. A global “jazz-cum-experimental&improvised-music” scene...

So...my questions.

Re: Mother Tongue. I see from your interviews (and hear in your music) that you are clearly a native of vernacular American English and its musical (“jazz”) correlates, as well as the mother tongue of your own parents. When I experienced my own midlife quest to ancestral roots by learning German, I sensed an almost physical sensation of German as the mother tongue of English. Growing up a white American, and mastering the English language professionally (as a writer), when I learned German, I felt my brain moving from a ping-pong game between Latin, Greek, and a host of other English-feeding tongues to an old and solid, unmoving tree with many branches (the German language).

My question: does your access to your parents’ language contrast with your equal access to American English in a comparably distinctive way, that carries over into the cadences and flow of your music? (I took in your language-based processes of composing for Mother Tongue; I’m wondering if your experience of those various Indian languages, or of the one you actually grew up around, differs in a way you can articulate from the relationship between American [or African- or Asian-American] speech patterns that shows up in your music).

RM Well . . . . I would say no. I don’t speak my parents’ language unfortunately. I have to say that people have told me that I have a unique and immediately recognizable lilt to the way I speak, which I believe does carry over to my music. Whether or not this is result of hearing parents speak Kannada growing up is something that I can’t say for sure. I will say, though, that Indian-English across the board is rather sing-songy. That is a trait that I believe permeates my speech, music, and soul for that matter.


MH Re: Codebook (conceived and constructed around number-based processes). My immediate reaction to this was to remember my Wesleyan University exposure to South Indian musicians and their audiences who tap out on their hands the number patterns of rhythms...and, more generally, the way Indian tradition with mathematics and music high and low generally feels more embodied and tactile than abstract and theoretical, as Western mathematics and music both seem.

My question: does your background—as a typical American child, but also one raised by an advanced scientist from India—lend itself, as you contemplate and estimate it, to a more tactile and embodied experience of the kinds of simple and complex number science that you musicalize than to a more Western abstraction and disembodied concept of same?

RM Yes. There’s no question about that. I never felt like an artist in the traditionally “god-given creative” or “naturally talented” sort of way. My math-science background is always present in my music blatantly and subtly. That being the case, discovering how “mathy” Indian music is (especially Carnatic music) was almost a homecoming for me, a moment where all my interests and personalities aligned. I believe that most good art is organized, whether that’s Coltrane or Jackson Pollock. Perhaps accessing that science/math background is my way of remaining organized while still writing and playing passionately.

MH I noticed in some of your press the point that Indian historical grasp of patterns such as the Fibonacci series—in poetic meter—predated European discoveries of same. To what extent does this fact inform your music, especially in the passion (as opposed to the rational platforms) of the awareness or idea?

RM I don’t think I read that article. I wasn’t aware of that. Music that is brainy and passionate is something to which I have aspired for a long time. To find out in my early twenties that there was a long history of this sort of thinking AND that it was “embodied” in my ancestry absolutely blew my mind!

MH Since I have touched on literature there—in what way, to what extent, does any knowledge you may have of traditional Indian religious or literary texts impinge on your musical creativity, either in mechanical (meter of poetry, macro-structure of texts) or mythological ways?

It doesn’t really as of yet. I have read some of the epic religious works associated with Hinduism but have not related them musically. I did compose one piece called The Preserver, as I felt that western religion places much emphasis on Gods as creators and destroyers, but nothing in between. This piece goes through 4 different meters/beat cycles. This was a sort of commentary on the idea that one never sees the fourth head of Hinduism’s four-headed gods and goddesses. The original title of that piece was actually Four Faces.

MH Can you talk to me more about the spiritual-cum-philosophical dimensions of Indian culture and its literary/musical artifacts that may influence your music? I ask this in the sense that, again, you came up as a typical American kid, who later got into typical American jazz...but then, in maturity, started delving into more specifically Indian roots. How has that evolved, and tinged your musical visions and processes, if at all?
RM In a broad sense, I hold dearly the Indian concept that music is at once an art and science, concrete and spiritual, tangible and ethereal. Maybe this idea is a formation (and maybe even a generalization) that only exists in my mind, but it is with me constantly. The fact that so much of Hindu mythology can be calculated (such as the exact lifespan of the universe, etc.) and can yet remain so wonderfully open and welcoming spiritually is fascinating to me. I want to make music that promotes that perception. The fact that the rhythm and melodic content of Indian classical music comes evolved from the Vedas is also mind-boggling. I guess that this notion of completeness is something that I want to undertake. It’s like Gesamtkuntswerk for contemporary American life.

MH Since you did live through your formative years as a more a jazz fan than an Indian-identity entity (if you will), can you talk to me about how you see what you’re up to now as it compares to African-American masters who started out as, roughly, more American than African-American, but then later moved into a quest into African roots? I’m thinking of people like Max Roach and Coltrane, and Yusef Lateef, who started out in the Ameri-“jazz” discourse, but moved it as they matured into a more Africentric kind of gesture. Your music seems to have that arc. Earlier, you eschewed the idea of having a tabla player, as too superficial and gimmicky (a point I take); but later, you do have tabla players, and vina kinds of backgrounds, and collaborations with a non-jazz Indian saxophonist.

My question: do you identify with any past masters of the jazz pantheon who found themselves starting out in the mainstream jazz tradition, but pushed on into a more ethnocentric (Africentric, mostly) expression that then redirected the face and momentum of the music thereby?
RM I do identify with these masters but am hesitant to put myself in their class. The masters to which I believe you are referring are in a league of their own, musically. Furthermore, there is no way that an Indian-American can ever relate to the African-American experience (regardless of how many of “us” try). Obviously, they have clearly been a model on which I have found a way to express my hybrid identity through music.

MH I notice a certain complexity, Indian-flavored, in your compositions...but then a closer-to-jazz-traditional approach in the improvisational sections of much of your music. Can you say anything about how that works from where you sit? that movement from the composed statement to the improvisation on it, and the relationship of the two?
Interesting. I feel that my voice as a composer and improviser sits squarely in between being “Indian-flavored” and “jazzy.” In both, I deal with a lot of raga-like melodic constructions, south Indian rhythmic attitudes, and some shenai/nagaswaram-like timbres while simultaneously working with lots of harmonic and melodic concepts from 20th Century music, Coltrane, bird, Louis Armstrong, etc. Since I compose for my own groups, I always create structure for improvisation that highlights my knowledge and vocabulary. I guess that gets into that criticism of Bop where folks talked about not knowing where the melody ends and the blowing starts.
MH Re: Codebook again: I was interested in your father’s influence in your life, and also the field of science/math. One of my good friends for many years in Eugene, Oregon, was Amit Goswami, a theoretical physicist like your father who has written and lectured much about the imbrications of science, consciousness, and science fiction.
Have you been interested in science fiction, as well as science? More pertinently: can you talk to me about the relationship between rational science and mythological imagination, and how or whether it finds its way into some sort of musical synthesis in your work?

RM I am a huge Sci-fi fan. In fact, I wrote a suite once based on William Gibson’s Neuromancer trilogy. I tried to musically emulate a few of the characters and environments put forth in those novels. There are parts of that suite that we still play sometimes. . . .
Since I first encountered the concept of programmatic music and later text painting, I’ve always tried to deal with imagery in my music. However, the images I enjoy are “organized.” That’s to again say, that I see all of these things intersecting. Even with Mother Tongue (an album that’s so concept heavy), it was important to “paint” musical portraits--not that those are at all related to the speech samples or the root languages. I guess the musical imagery is more stylistically unique to me, a compositional signature of sorts?

MH Re: the name Indo-Pak Coalition. I read an article by scholar Martha Nussbaum in a recent issue of Chronicle of Higher Education, about your kin’s homeland of Gujarat. It detailed the conflict between right-wing Hindu and Muslim groups, in brutal detail.
My question: to what extent are you involved with sociopolitical issues native to your parents’ roots? More generally, how do these issues impact your music? This question goes to the jazz-traditional dimension of racial-cultural issues in the American context. If we are moving from Ameri-local to global political issues, as intellectuals and artists, how do such issues impinge on your project as an artist, in the same way American sociopolitics impinged on musicians such as Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, Mingus and Coltrane, Shepp and...whoever?
(My take is that these issues—more broadly, Indian caste system, Gandhi/Tagore/Nehru background...all of which impacted African-American Civil Rights intellectual history seminally—are unavoidable at a certain point in the music, if its Indian influence is going to have a lasting impact. What are your thoughts?)
RM I feel quite disconnected from sociopolitical issues of my parents and in-laws. My parents are from Bangalore, which is not-at-all close to the hotspots of Hindu-Muslim fighting. Furthermore, my parents are Veerashaivas (or Lingayats), a sect of Hinduism that long ago abandoned the caste system. I see myself and my music as being political in the way I express bi-cultural identity and fight racism and stereotyping. Maybe that’s political enough for now.

MH The interview between you and Vijay in CIES brought up the issue of class: towit—you guys are upper-middle-class guys by virtue of being born into intellectual-professional families. You said you weren’t any richer than the other starving artists in Chicago, or whatever—but how might you answer the question of whether you might dedicate yourself to the life of the musician if you weren’t, as your father put it, part of the “upper echelon” of musicians? Does this question strike a nerve in you?

RM First of all, my Dad doesn’t know what he’s talking about in regard to that “upper echelon” stuff. Obviously, I had no idea what impact my music would and will ultimately have. I’m just doing the best I can and sticking to what I believe. To me, dedicating myself to the life of the musician entails everything that I’ve done artistically so far. I’m just glad that people have liked it and that I can afford to live in a comfortable way because of their support.
MH Backing off from the confrontation of that last question...I noticed that your recordings of the Dakshina ensemble were “raw materials” indeed. Your words about adjusting to the sruti of your Indian collaborator were telling.
My question: do you experience something akin to the Africentric radicals who went to Africa in the ‘60s, only to find that they were as estranged from their “roots” as any white guys might be, because they were indeed more American than African?

RM Dakshina, yes. What a challenge. It’s interesting that you ask this question. I hung out with Kadri for about 2 weeks working on this music while a steady stream of his family, friends, students, and fans streamed through his apartment. They all asked the same question, “Are you Indian or are you American?” I never gave up on trying to talk about what it means to be Indian-American but it was obviously lost on them. India does not have a significant immigrant culture that I’m aware of except for perhaps the Chinese in some areas. The idea of hybrid culture is an alien concept. Trying to talk about my wife (who is also Indian-American) and her work, our hybrid wedding, etc. was a lost cause. I felt dismissed for the most part. Along similar lines, Kadri was more than surprised as to how much I understood of Carnatic music. He had not expected me to “deal on his terms” so well.

MH Rudresh—again, thanks...your music is The Shit, as we say; all else is details...

RM Thanks!

Let me know if you have any more questions and want to me to elaborate on anything.