Returning
to the topic of the Indian Connection in world music, we recall our post on pioneering
Goan film music arrangers, who drew heavily on western rock and jazz pieces
without anybody looking askance, simply because they, in the first place, were
co-creators of these genres.
In
the late nineteen-fifties, the American Government, in order to live down the
country’s reputation on racial discrimination, decided to show-case Jazz, a
product of Afro-American cohabitation, before the world at large, and the
greatest names of Jazz were paid to criss-cross the globe. The results were rewarding
to both sides, to say the least. Dave Brubeck was one of the greats of Jazz who
visited Bombay in that phase. The Dave Brubeck Quartet was responsible for
making ‘Take Five’ composed by Paul Desmond possibly the greatest Single in the
history of Jazz.
A
word about Take Five. We had occasion to allude to the principal requisite for
a composition to qualify for the Jazz tag: the asymmetry between the rhythm and
the melody. The closest to the Indian Classical experience is the phenomenon
reputedly invented by Amir Khusro, wherein the melody breaks step with the tala, only to converge on a later sam after the least common multiple of
the two streams has been played out…The time signature symbol of Take Five is a
4 topped by 5, something like 5/4, which indicates that there are 5 beats to a
bar with quarter note-value in the
accompanying melody. In Indian terminology this roughly means that the tala is of 5 or 5*x matras, while the notes accommodated in each cycle are 4 in number.
As for ‘bar’, if we were to put down teen-taal
notionally on a music sheet, there will be 16 intervals bar to bar. Take
Five sounds incredibly sweet to YT:
The
visit of Brubeck and friends and their extraordinary voyage of discovery has
been chronicled by Naresh Fernandes in his blog. In Bombay a Jam Session was
arranged in which IK’s sitar muse Ustad Abdul Halim Jaffer Khan participated.
Here is what Fernandes writes:
One evening the pianist Dave Brubeck and his
quartet gathered in the home of a jazz-loving industrialist on Mumbai’s Malabar
Hills to chat with a group of Indian Musicians led by the sitar maestro Abdul
Halim Jaffer Khan. They picked up their instruments and put their new knowledge
to work. The jam session, the American pianist said later, changed the way he
approached his art. “His (the Ustad’s) influence made me play in a different
way,” Mr. Brubeck told Jazz Journal International. “Although Hindu scales,
melodies and harmonies are different, we understood each other…the folk origins of music aren’t far apart anywhere in the
world.”
 |
| USTAD JAMS WITH QUARTET |
The
Ustad’s influence is lasting and cerebral, going beyond the cosmetic ‘fusion’ Param
Vir talked about in this post. What a tribute to AHJK the Musician’s Musician as we once called him, be sure we shall
find out what the Ustad has to say about it when we visit him this Guru Purnima, that’s when he is annually
feted by his disciples and fans….the article of curiosity will be the reverse flow- how was AHJK influenced by Dave...
PS: not to forget the insight offered by Brubeck on the Unity of the musical Godhead!
PS: not to forget the insight offered by Brubeck on the Unity of the musical Godhead!
1 comment:
Very interesting read. though one does wonder about race relations in America when black Jazz music has an international ambassador as white as they come:)
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