For much of his career, alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa has explored the various inroads between jazz and non-Western musical traditions.
After winning a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, Mahanthappa studied Carnatic music in India; “Samdhi,” his subsequent album from 2011, fused those teachings with exhilarating, electric guitar-driven grooves and laptop textures. “Gamak,” his follow-up with Screaming Headless Torsos guitarist David Fiuczynski, detoured slightly into harmonically expansive, largely acoustic small-band jazz that progressed along a similar world-jazz arc.
Mahanthappa’s latest album, “Bird Calls,” however, finds inspiration a little closer to home: the musical language of bebop pioneer Charlie Parker, who was one of Mahanthappa’s earliest influences. On Friday, June 5, he’ll bring his quintet — trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, pianist Matt Mitchell, acoustic bassist Francois Moutin and drummer Jordan Perlson, who’ll sub for Rudy Royston — to Firehouse 12 in New Haven for two sets of music from the album.
“[‘Bird Calls’] was such a great divergence from all this work I’ve been doing with non-Western music and South Asian music,” Mahanthappa said. “It was to remind myself and everybody else that I am a jazz player at heart, and Charlie Parker was what made me want to play before I’d ever heard any Indian music. It was nice for me to get back into that space and to share it with others with this album.”
“Bird Calls” collects eight original compositions, and each extrapolates some musical element of a Parker tune: “On the DL” is based on “Donna Lee,” “Chillin'” flows from “Relaxin’ at the Camarillo,” and so on. Some pieces, like “On the DL,” recontextualize Parker’s musical language — infamous for its frantic chord changes, substitutions and superimpositions — into harmonically static, rhythmically charged environments. “Harmonically, in terms of that sort of content, it’s probably more like my other albums,” Mahanthappa said.
“Chillin’,” meanwhile, like “Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” maintains the structure of the blues, but Mahanthappa widens the spaces between each of its three four-bar sections, requiring a soloist to play a cue (taken directly from Parker’s fourth, eighth and 12th bars) to usher in the next four-bar chunk.
“Sure Why Not?” redirects Parker’s galloping “Confirmation” into a gentle ballad, while maintaining the original chord progression. “One of the things that’s always been fascinating to me is to take tunes that are really fast and playing them like a ballad,” Mahanthappa said. “It just changes your whole perspective… I feel like Charlie Parker was always switching it up, too.”
“Maybe Later,” based on “Now’s the Time,” takes the rhythmic content of Parker’s famous solo and switches up the pitch content. It’s also the rare spot on “Bird Calls” where you’ll hear a swing groove.
“We talk about how great Bird is and we talk about his rhythmic sense, but let’s really take it a step further and look at Charlie Parker only as a rhythmic force and forget about the harmony and the melody,” Mahanthappa said. “Rhythmically alone, that’s a killing solo [on ‘Now’s the Time’]… It had to swing. It was conscious, because it was mandatory.”
The eight pieces are woven together with five “Bird Calls” — short improvisations by the full ensemble (#1), a pair of musicians (Mahanthappa and O’Farrill on #2) or a soloist (saxophone on #3, bass on #4, piano on #5) that serve as introductions to what follows. Each was recorded in a single take. “The way I described it to the band was for it to just be a meditation for yourself, just reflect on what Charlie Parker means to you,” Mahanthappa said. “It was really about, ‘Hey, get up and talk about Charlie Parker for two minutes,’ in a very spontaneous way, without judging it or editing it, just to play from that perspective of the heart.”
Before its official debut at the Newport Jazz Festival in August 2014, “Bird Calls” started life as part of the Tribeca Performing Arts Center’s Lost Jazz Shrine series. “I thought about this project for a long time, and this was the right opportunity, the perfect setting,” Mahanthappa said. Later, during a weeklong residency at The Stone, John Zorn’s East Village performance space, he realized “Bird Calls” should be his next serious project.
“My friend [saxophonist] Steve Lehman came to one of the nights of the Bird thing, and he was just blown away,” Mahanthappa said. “He said, ‘Man, you guys sound like a band. You need to go into the studio and make this record.'”
Following the Firehouse 12 appearance, Mahanthappa brings “Song of the Jasmine,” a music-dance collaboration with Ragamala Dance Company’s Aparna Ramaswamy and Ranee Ramaswamy, to the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven on June 16-17. He’ll perform in an ensemble with guitarist Rez Abbasi and Carnatic musicians Raman Kalyan (flute), Rajna Swaminathan (percussion) and Anjna Swaminathan (violin).
His “Bird Calls” quintet members, meanwhile, are “incredibly rich, incredibly deep musicians,” Mahanthappa said, but he never thought to ask if they worshipped Charlie Parker as much as he did.
“With these masters, it’s interesting: we talk about Trane, we talk about Bird, we talk about Louis Armstrong and Ellington,” Mahanthappa said. “But everyone has their key points, their key people. For some people Art Pepper is more important than Charlie Parker, or Lennie Tristano is more important than Duke Ellington. We all just try to absorb as much as we can and to make something new and contemporary out of it.”
RUDRESH MAHANTHAPPA QUINTET performs at Firehouse 12 in New Haven on Friday, June 5 at 8:30 p.m. ($20) and 10 p.m. ($15). Information: firehouse12.com.
