New Friends Appear: Arun Ramamurthy Trio at The Blue Room

The confluence of Indian music and jazz has a rich history that extends in many directions. Back in the day, artists like Yusef Lateef, John and Alice Coltrane were interested in Indian music, while composer John Mayer was seriously exploring the melding of these two immense musical worlds. In the recent past, Badal Roy, John McLaughlin’s Shakti, L Subramaniam, Trilok Gurtu and Zakir Hussain have all contributed to the integration of Indian music and jazz.  Today, musicians like Rudresh Mahanthappa, Debashish Bhattacharya, Arun Ghosh and Sunny Jain continue to move the needle in all quadrants. Add violinist Arun Ramamurthy’s name to this list.

Ramamurthy’s Trio, featuring electric bassist Damon Banks and drummer Sameer Gupta, performed a Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares concert on November 9 before a full house at the Blue Room at CitySpace in Easthampton, MA. Touring in support of their recent Greenleaf recording, New Moon, the Trio supplied a much needed respite from recent unsettling election news.

The “New Moon Suite”, which formed the backbone of both the concert and the recording, was composed by Ramamurthy with support from a Chamber Music America New Jazz Works grant. Like Jason Robinson’s compositions for his “Ancestral Numbers” project which Jazz Shares produced last month, the inspiration for “New Moon Suite” comes from a beloved maternal grandmother.

Ramamurthy’s music brought us many places. There is a mournful, blues-like thread that weaves its way through much Indian music. There were parts of “Aaji”, named for his grandmother, and “Sri Valli”, which concluded the evening, where plaintive melodies were bent in sorrow song. “Amavasya” had a powerful backbeat and a funky refrain, perhaps not surprising from a composer raised on A Tribe Called Quest and Radiohead. The music had open sections filled with indeterminate rhythms and harmonies, but in the main had well-defined contours, anchored by the brilliant efforts of Banks and Gupta.

The Arun Ramamurthy Trio is a real band; they inhabited the material as if they had each wrote it. That cohesion is the result of long shared history and a number of live concerts since this music debuted in 2022. Ramamurthy and Gupta go back to 2006 and are co-founders of Brooklyn Raga Massive,  a progressive genre-bending collective of musicians rooted-in and inspired-by the classical music of India. Ramamurthy and Banks have shared history in Adam Rudolph’s GO: Organic Orchestra. Brooklyn Raga Massive is featured with GO: Organic on the outstanding 2019 release, Ragmala: A Garland of Ragas. This 30-piece juggernaut performed the last Magic Triangle Jazz Series concert at UMass in April, 2022. Ramamurthy, however, had COVID at the time and missed the date.

After living in New York for over 15 years, Gupta moved his family back to his hometown in the SF Bay area a few years ago to care for parents. Ramamurthy is reluctant to use other drummers in the Trio, which means they have to be strategic about scheduling work. Gupta, who is also an accomplished tabla player, told me about his relationship with pianist Marc Cary, whom he called “family”. When Cary recruited him to be a member of his Focus Trio almost 20 years ago, he went to the Gupta home to assure his parents that allowing Sameer to move to New York would advance his musical career. Gupta, who has also worked with Grachan Moncur III, Sonny Simmons and the poet Sekou Sundiata, was masterful, precisely tossing off double and triple time figures with ease. His unaccompanied solo towards the end of the concert elicited a rousing response from the throng of 100.  

Like his bandmates, Damon Banks is engaging and kind. His role was as essential to the sound of the Trio as Aston Barrett’s was with the Wailers. He provided ballast for Ramamurthy’s sailing violin, and with judicious use of pedals and effects, created drone-like sound beds for the band’s soaring discourse. Born and raised in the Bronx and educated at the High School of Music & Art and Fisk University, Banks has provided services for artists ranging from George Benson and Arto Lindsay, to Hassan Hakmoun and Angelique Kidjo. He will be back in the area on March 8 performing with Aaron Shragge’s Whispering World, and will be tagging along on January 4 when his wife, the violinist Gwen Laster, brings her New Muse4tet to Springfield.

The New Moon Suite is a meditation on multiculturalism. Studying South Indian Carnatic music while growing up in New Jersey, Ramamurthy had one foot in two very different musical cultures. “It was Aaji who reminded me that there was only ONE me,” Ramamurthy writes in the liner notes. “That there actually are no lines.” That oneness permeated the music we heard on Thursday. Ragas, spiritual jazz, the vast openness of the avant-garde, the funk of urban America, were all clearly present, happily co-existing in one organic form.

The Arum Ramamurthy Trio was at Next Stage Arts in Putney, VT on October 18, and performed at the Iron Horse in late September, as part of the Northampton Jazz Festival. I was glad Festival organizers Ruth Griggs, Paul Arslanian and Carol Abbe Smith, who were so busy running around that day they didn’t get to hear the Trio, were in the house and able to sit with the music. For all of us, it was a balm for battered souls.

Love Fest: Jason Robinson's Ancestral Numbers in Amherst

Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares, the small non-profit dedicated to bringing extraordinary live music to western Massachusetts, achieved a high-water mark on October 17. Jason Robinson’s Ancestral Numbers quintet gave a spirited and technically brilliant display of music-making before a packed house at The Drake. Thursday’s event, featuring Robinson (tenor and soprano sax and flute), Michael Dessen (trombone), Joshua White (piano), Drew Gress (bass), and Ches Smith (drums), drew 175 listeners, the second most in the 13 year history of the organization.

Robinson is a Professor of Music at Amherst College, who joined the faculty as a visiting assistant professor in 2008. He has spent the last 16 years invigorating the local jazz scene, building bridges across stylistic and geographic divides. He has not only increased the amount of jazz activity at Amherst, he has laid deep roots where he lives, seeming to have interacted with every major improvisor in the Valley. Robinson is also a charter member of the Jazz Shares board of directors. He is a true home-town hero.

Many in the crowd were Amherst College colleagues of Robinson, including President Michael Elliott, Provost Martha Umphrey and a slew of faculty, staff and students. It was important for them to understand, if they didn’t already, that Robinson is an elite composer, instrumentalist and bandleader. Among the many other friends in the crowd was Michael Musillami, the guitarist and label owner of Playscape Records who released Robinson’s new recordings Ancestral Numbers I and II, and jazz scholar Ben Young, who recently moved to Holyoke. There was a lot of love in the room for Robinson.

The band, who performed as a quartet (minus Dessen) in Northampton in 2021, was embarked on a five date tour that took them to New York, Boston, New Haven and the greater Washington, DC. area. They played material from the two Ancestral Numbers discs, featuring compositions inspired by Robinson’s family history, in particular his grandmother, Ruby Annette Kilbury, who passed in 2022. The composer told us he was the latest (and last) in a line of eldest children born when their mothers were 17 years old going back to his great great grandmother.

Robinson and Dessen are long-time friends and formed the front line of the quartet Cosmologic during the first decade of the 21st century; they met in 1998 at UC San Diego where they were mentored by Anthony Davis and George Lewis. Dessen has taught at UC Irvine since 2006 and is currently chair of its music department. Robinson and Dessen are successful, engaged educators and world class performers/composers; they embody Aristotle’s dictum: “Those who can, do. Those who understand, teach.” Of course they nailed the impossible swing tempos of “Deployment”, grooved the backbeat of “Greyscale”, and breezed through the slinky contours of “Second House”. By the way, Robinson, a veteran of the roots reggae band Groundation, has produced a dub version of “Second House”.

While the demands of academia can make maintaining chops difficult, Dessen’s sound was rich and confident, his facility crisp, and his ability to read down complicated charts undiminished. I’ve been knowing Michael Dessen since the late 1990s when he was studying with Yusef Lateef at UMass, and became friends when he returned to the Valley in 2002 to teach at Hampshire College. I’ve gotten to witness some of his cutting edge forays into telematics or networked concerts, where collaborators in distant locations perform together in real time. Here is an excellent example of his work in this realm. 

Pianist Joshua White lives in San Diego and doesn’t get east very often, which made his Amherst appearance even more special. I listen to a lot of pianists and there are very few that reach the heights White does. The crowd at the Drake agreed. His solos consistently generated the loudest yelps and most thunderous applause. When I talked with his bandmates about him the next day, they laughed and shook their heads at how talented he is. I remember getting the same reaction years ago from Vijay Iyer when talking about a little known drummer named Tyshawn Sorey. Hearing some of the best musicians in the world marvel at how off the charts White is, tells you all you need to know about his gift. He played with force, locking hands to add energy and using his dexterity to articulate well crafted runs of single notes. He deserved every minute of the ample solo space he was afforded.

The rest of the rhythm section is crème de la crème. Finding windows of time when both Drew Gress and Ches Smith are available is one of Robinson’s biggest challenges. I met Gress in 1995 when the Magic Triangle Jazz Series presented Tom Varner’s Quintet, and again in 2002 when he was part of Uri Caine’s genre-busting version of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations”. He has been a first call bassist for Tim Berne, Don Byron, John Abercrombie, Fred Hersch and Dave Douglas, among others, and has released a half-dozen projects as a leader. On more than one occasion Robinson has commented how Gress’s deep sound and unerring sense of time provides the ultimate security blanket.

Smith is simply one of the most active drummers and expansive musical minds working today. His last three releases as a leader on Pyroclastic Records (Laugh Ash, Interpret It Well, and Path of Seven Colors) are each wildly different and extremely ambitious, and he has greatly added to the bands of Marc Ribot, David Torn and Dave Holland. He was locked in all evening, playing just loud enough, while adding delicate accents on glockenspiel. Smith will make his Jazz Shares debut as a leader in September alongside Mary Halvorson, Liberty Ellman and Nick Dunston.

Being able to present a dear friend in concert before an adoring home-town crowd was a pleasure to produce. The confluence of good vibes in the room and the high level of music and musicianship is why we do what we do. 

The Cream Rises: Joseph Daley's Tonal Colors Trio

There comes a time in an artist’s life when the pendulum swings, and the hard work and dogged pursuit of excellence forged over many years begins to bear fruit. With mid-career in the rear view mirror, the accumulation of credits and accomplishments becomes so impressive, the time left so precious, that respect, and maybe even a few accolades, begin to pour in. Such is the case with Joseph Daley, the 75-year old low brass player whose performance on October 6 at Hawks & Reed in Greenfield was a study in power and restraint.

Accompanied by bassist Ken Filiano and guitarist Shu Odamura, Daley debuted his Tonal Colors Trio on Sunday for a Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares audience of 50. Playing tuba, euphonium, piano and wood flute, Daley led the ensemble in an evening of bracing and elegiac music.

The first half of the concert featured an open floor plan, mostly non-metered and harmonically free with textures galore. Filiano and Daley, playing tuba, inhabited a similar nether world of bottom friendly sound, with Odamura’s shimmering guitar floating on top. The music, while untethered, nevertheless had a certain momentum, propelling us through uncharted soundscapes. This approach, never settled but not unsettling, was peppered with short sections of intricately written material that seemed to come out of nowhere, nailed with precision.

The second half of the program was highlighted by a gorgeous rendition of Don Pullen’s “Ode To Life”, that jumped off the stage with a beauty that made us gasp. Why this composition has not become a modern jazz standard is beyond me. Pullen’s piece was brilliantly juxtaposed with an equally beautiful Daley original dedicated to his late wife, Wanda. Daley has written a number of works in honor of his wife and he includes at least one during every live performance. Odamura told me later that he was not familiar with the composition, but once he figured out what key it was written in, was able to acquit himself quite convincingly.

Odamura was born in Kyoto, Japan and moved to the U.S. in 2006 to attend the Berklee School of Music on scholarship. He’s been living in New York since 2009, including five years in my old stomping grounds of Woodside, Queens. Affable, humble and a monster player, Odamura had a clean ringing sound and an approach that was devoid of grandstanding and excessive volume. Perhaps his extensive experience making music for theater, including over a decade as musical director for Watoku Ueno’s shadow puppetry group, explains the guitarist’s ability to fit in and serve the music.

Filiano was his usual commanding self. The great bass player has been a regular and welcome presence at recent Jazz Shares events, enhancing bands led by Anders Griffen, Taylor Ho Bynum and Jeff Cosgrove in the last couple of years. This time Filiano employed an array of pedals and electronic effects to enhance his sound. Watching him manipulate his devices was a bit distracting, but when I closed my eyes and focused only on auditory information, the bent, swooped world he created opened up vistas. Combined with his patented vocalizations and the knitting needles he wove between his bass strings, Filiano embodied the band’s name: tonal colors, indeed.

Regal yet relaxed in his stocking feet and beautiful print tunic, Joseph Daley seemed cut from African royalty. Obscured behind a music stand and his large coil of brass, Daley controlled the proceedings with a light but confident touch. Appearing almost two years to the day since his Jazz Shares debut with Reggie Nicholson’s Brass Concept, Daley celebrated his 75th circumnavigation of the sun by leading his trio in a masterful display of improvisatory spirit. After a good run on tuba, Daley moved to the smaller, nimbler euphonium, a cousin to the baritone horn, my instrument of choice through middle and high school. The baritone, Daley explained, has a cylindrical bore, meaning that the tubing is a uniform diameter throughout most of the instrument. The euphonium on the other hand, has conical tubing, it gets larger as it moves from mouthpiece to bell. Explained like the consummate public school teacher he was.

Daley has also been the consummate side man over his illustrious 50 year career. I know him from his ground breaking stint with Sam River’s Trio, as well as his work with Taj Mahal, Howard Johnson’s tuba-heavy outfit, Gravity, and the big bands of Gil Evans, Charlie Haden and Carla Bley. I first met him in 2015, when he (and Filiano) performed with Jason Kao Hwang’s genre-straddling project, Burning Bridge, as part of the UMass Magic Triangle Jazz Series. But Daley is also a first rate composer and arranger. Do yourself a favor and check out his brilliant 2011 opus, The Seven Deadly Sins, and his 2013 follow up, The Seven Heavenly Virtues, both featuring his orchestral Earth Tones Ensemble.

Late in the concert Daley played piano and a Native American wood flute, which moved things in a spiritual direction and lightened up the evening’s dark sonorities. It was the perfect coda to a night of adventure and exploration, and served as an invitation to delve deeper into the remarkable career of Joseph Daley.