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.
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