The Jazzy Raga of Cultures in MILES FROM INDIA
Dhani Muniz looks back at a masterpiece of cross-cultural curation, Miles From India, a one-of-a-kind document of two traditions bonding over a shared appreciation and recognition of the language of a true musical maverick.
During a recent performance in Bangalore, an audience member came up to me. How old is your album? he asked. Where can I purchase it?
Well, the second question was easy enough. The first, one, however, knocked me for a loop. Was he asking how long ago the pieces were conceived? Arranged? Played for the first time with other people? Played for the first time in front of an audience? The answer to at least one of these would be “yesterday”, but the full span of time encapsulated in the one question was nearing six years. I decided to halve it, smile and excuse myself as quickly as possible.
“Three years,” I said with a quick grin, already on my way out the door.
After discussing it with a few friends I settled with what felt most correct to me: Music is truly born when it is first played with other musicians. The rest is packaging.
Over a cup of mango juice afterwards, I reflected on the exchange. What constitutes a ‘release’? Does it occur when the music first comes out of the individual, when it’s shown by them to others, or when the rest of the world is able to hear it? After discussing it with a few friends I had settled with what felt most correct to me: Music is truly born when it is first played with other musicians. The rest is packaging.
(Aside from Western classical, which is truly closer to literature, but that’s an argument for another day or drink).
To that end, we are now in the rough vicinity of the 15th anniversary of Bob Belden’s masterpiece of cross-cultural curation, Miles From India, a one-of-a-kind document of two traditions bonding over a shared appreciation and an inner recognition of the language of a true musical maverick. Since the late-60’s, Miles Davis’ quest for a new kind of music has been romanticized, de-romanticized, embraced, loved for dubious reasons, spat on, and misinterpreted. Despite being partially inspired by downtime he spent listening to Muddy Waters in the clubs of Chicago’s South Side, this new music was not simply a spontaneous reaction against the “quantum mechanics” of his Second Quintet out of a desire to “just play the blues again”. Rather, the music was a reaction against the limits set by jazz orthodoxy, itself an utterly alien concept for a man who witnessed and influenced the creation of bebop in the late 40’s.
A man with the mind of a folk musician, Davis was only interested in playing music appropriate for the times in which he lived, and he closely observed how, twenty years later, his audiences couldn’t relate to the same songs on the same level as before. He saw the difference in setting, measured it against the difference in sound, and promptly went back to the drawing board.
The rest is history, but it all comes racing back while listening to Miles From India (2008). Masterminded by saxophonist and Columbia Records’ remastering maestro Bob Belden, the collection features the best of both India and America: an almost unheard-of accomplishment. Dave Liebman, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Lenny White, Louis and Gino Banks, Mike Stern, Rakesh Chaurasia, Jimmy Cobb, Ravi Chary, Michael Henderson, Vikku Vinayakram, Adam Holzman, A. Sivamani, Pete Cosey, Pandit Brij Narain, Gary Bartz, Badal Roy, and more. The list is tremendous.
As so many of us know, All-Star tributes can often be uninspiring, and sometimes, downright painful listening experience. Miles From India, however, surprises from the get-go. Gorgeous renditions of classic melodies like “Blue In Green” sit side by side with the alternatingly hyperactive and ominous dirge of “Ife” and the proto-ambient exploration of “In A Silent Way”. “All Blues” boasts an incredible sitar interpretation by Chary.
My only question is: Why don’t we get to hear more of this?
The answer arrived chugging murkily along with “Miles Runs The Voodoo Down”. Lenny White’s drums and each melodic soloist—Wallace Roney’s trumpet, Holzman’s synth and, later, Pete Cosey’s blowtorch guitar in two movements—form an abstract tag-team attack against the granite foundations laid down by bassist Michael Henderson and the twin percussion masters Sivamani and Vinayakram, resulting in the band effectively dividing itself into a dynamic duo. The differences in timing and feel between the two sections are what give us the astounding net result. “So What” achieves something similar during Chick Corea’s wonderfully playful improvisations with Ron Carter on bass, and Ndugu Chancler’s buoyant drums meshed with the assorted percussion attacks of Selva Ganesh, Sridhar Parthasarthy and Taufiq Qureshi. There are times when it’s actually difficult to pick out who is playing what; on such an impeccably engineered record, this is an extraordinary achievement.
It is also not strictly jazz. Most of the pieces weren’t originally performed by a traditional jazz ensemble, and most aren’t written in anything resembling standard AABA form. Nor is it Hindustani or Carnatic music. It doesn’t purport to be any of the above. “Call it anything,” were Davis’ all-too-famous words, uttered just after playing a 40-minute uninterrupted set to the biggest audience of any ‘jazz’ artist in history at the Isle of Wight festival in 1970.
Alto saxophones and masterful vocal ragas meet at strange summits and fade into oblivion. This is not a Berklee field trip to the gharana, but the gharana’s field trip to Latin America; years later, the kids sound like they’re still digging it.
This was not a man overly taken with words or descriptions. He was perplexed when critics accused him of pandering to younger audiences by using electric instruments, because ‘pandering’ was a term used for ‘high art’ and he was never one to distinguish between the two (the title track of his electric breakthrough, Bitches Brew, was fashioned from a sketch of a piece he was writing for three pianos—fairly unheard of, outside of Bach, Charles Ives, and a few geniuses in their basements.) These compositions cannot be considered in or fully apprehended by any one strict musical language, at risk of becoming obsolete. Rather, each piece sketches out the rough borders of the language that can be used within it. Each is a blank canvas and a handful of cut-out shapes, the colours to be contributed by the contributors. Matisse smiles from beyond the grave
(A sidebar: Would the meeting of Davis and Jens Haaning result in instant antimatter? And if so, how much could you sell it for?).
Not too long ago, I had discussed the work of Brooklyn-based jazz upright bassist and composer Harish Raghavan, as an example of an artist who allows himself to breathe in the air of his own traditions without overwhelming or forcing his identity on the music as a whole. Raghavan lets his Indian-ness shine through, without keeping it front and centre, so as to build a more intimate dialogue with his bandmates. It’s a dialogue less based on any one musician’s ‘culture’ and getting closer to one based on in-the-moment reaction. Instinct as a wellspring through which ‘culture’ flows.
So why don’t we see or hear more of this? Why is it so revelatory when a musician manages to make this marriage work convincingly? Just as the Western world has proudly tried and failed to do since severing (overt) ties to its own colonialist upbringings, leaving the past behind is a tricky task. And while it might be easy for us in the future to look back objectively and point out where everybody else screwed up, one need only take a look at our world today to know that we haven’t quite figured things out ourselves yet—nor are we necessarily closer than those cellar-door ghosts we like to disdain. It takes an impressive degree of humility and taste to back off and let your own creations breathe—some might say that it’s a lost art.
And then, the gears grind into place; we don’t hear enough of this music because we’ve come to accept the distinctly foreign notion of composition occurring at the time of conception rather than birth. We don’t hear more of it because we’ve grown used to our own annoying habit, of taking from the past what was easy, instead of what was good.
As we hear in Miles From India, the native music of the subcontinent boast a stunning range of textures, which are in turn multiplied exponentially when combined with the static yet trainlike momentum of Miles’ early electric-era compositions. Now, even as a culture, we are somewhat used to long melodic lines infused with Carnatic shrutis and a quick tihai bookending a stomping R&B/funk groove, and a smattering of individual solos- fruit of our modern, linear, ‘conception’-based ideal. Yet these blank canvasses allow new textures to actually assert themselves instead of waiting in the wings for the ‘jazz’ harmonies and solos to wrap it up. Bansuri and trumpet trade gleeful phrases over head-nodding grooves that carry an innate sense of danger, alto saxophones and masterful vocal ragas meet at strange summits and fade into oblivion... This is not a Berklee field trip to the gharana, but the gharana’s field trip to Latin America; years later, the kids sound like they’re still digging it.
There is a telling moment on “Jean Pierre”, just toward the end of Mike Stern’s turn at the helm, where Rakesh Chaurasia’s flute starts to peek through the clouds of Hendrix-level voltage, like a ray of sunshine in a thunderstorm. Suddenly both completely out of place, the two opposing forces trade hesitantly for a few moments before Stern retreats and lets Chaurasia’s unblemished skies take over for a little while, dancing on the ashes of the previous solo with shameless glee... Then somewhere off in the distance, a crack and a rumble: The guitar jumps in for another round of cold lashes mixed with warm breath, each opponent more confident this time. Rolling Stone’s senior editor David Fricke called this impact, “Like worlds colliding and blurring in a single room”.
The band returns to the bubblegum-chewing theme whenever they feel like it, and by the end of the last turn, you feel like you’ve really gone through an odyssey. Probably because you have.
As for taking what’s easy instead of what’s good, I can only think of the words of Marvin Gaye. “Who is to blame when we can’t stop living?” All we can ask for is someone to help us get the music ourselves, then someone else to show it to us.
Back in Bangalore, it appeared I’d spilled a drop of mango juice on myself while humming one of the melodies we’d just played.
“Ohhh, fuck yeah man!” I was approached by an interested, bespectacled young man wearing an orange jumper. “I loved that tune, wanted to download it on Spotify..."
"Seven Steps to Heaven”, I answered, stretching out with an exhausted yawn. Playing this music is more like a sport than anything else, you finish feeling like you ran a half-marathon. “Miles Davis and Vic Feldman,” I told him. “From 1963."
Mr. Orange Jumper spat up a few drops of juice onto his jumper, too. “‘63??? I thought only The Beatles and that old stuff was around then... not this stuff that had real groove.”
I was about to start explaining what groove really was, what makes something cerebral into a physical thing that can penetrate the bones of only the deader than dead. But why bother? I thought. He had already felt it. It was the musicians that had to catch up.
“Yeah man... Beautiful stuff,” I grinned sleepily, sinking into the couch. The message was in the music. I was happy just to be the imperfect messenger.
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Dhani Muniz is an Indo-Brazilian writer and musician. His writings focus on the subversive elements of human cultures and traditions, as well as the unifying elements of nature. Coming from a broad cultural background, and having lived in New York and Alaska as well as India, he strives to communicate a sense of rootlessness in his work—both in writing and music—as well as to effect a cross-pollination between his chosen disciplines. You can find him on Twitter: @suitetheexpatriate and Instagram: @suitetheexpatriate.
