Dec 17, 2024 9:58 AM
Tabla Master Zakir Hussain, 73, Succumbs to Illness
Tabla master Ustad Zakir Hussain, one of India’s reigning cultural ambassadors and a revered figure worldwide…
Adam Rudolph conducts the Go: Organic Orchestra at New York’s Rubin Museum of Art.
(Photo: Adrien H. Tillman)Bandleader and percussionist Adam Rudolph sees himself as an inventor, rather than a composer. Composers typically generate written music using a pencil or a music notation program, but he does more than that.
He creates new practices for making music.
“As an artist, I’ve always been interested in the creative process itself,” Rudolph said. “I believe that when you create a new process that the art you generate will be prototypical. Prototypical art means that the power of the individual voice actually takes the listener to a more universal experience.”
Rudolph has spent nearly five decades developing his individual voice. As a hand percussionist, he never fit neatly into the codified systems of European-derived classical music, but he did move easily through many other traditions with roots in oral expression. He spent much of his career traveling the globe and performing alongside creative musicians as diverse as multi-instrumentalist Yusef Lateef, trumpeters Don Cherry and Wadada Leo Smith, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, violinist L. Shankar, composer Philip Glass and pianist Omar Sosa. Along the way, Rudolph was working out his own ideas about what this “universal” listener experience might be—and how it might be achieved.
His latest recording, Ragmala: A Garland Of Ragas (Meta), stands as a testament to his sui generis creative process. The two-disc set—a gorgeously complex tapestry of sounds, hues and sensations—features Rudolph’s Go: Organic Orchestra, a 30-piece string-based improvisational ensemble, in a sublime pairing with the Brooklyn Raga Massive, a collective devoted to creative expressions of Indian classical music. On any of the album’s 20 tracks, one might hear a droning tanpura, a free-wailing trumpet, a string quartet, guttural throat singing,or a riffing rock guitar—all speaking to each other.
To understand why these inventive, culturally heterogeneous compositions work, it helps to dig into how Rudolph goes about creating them. His compositional approach stands on three pillars: his own intervallic matrices and cosmographs that he uses to establish the harmonic color of a piece; “ostinatos of circularity,” or polyrhythmic combinations that drive the musical motion; and a self-created system of conductor’s signals that lead the improvisation.
“I conduct the orchestra in the moment ... so that the score is rendered spontaneously with the musicians,” Rudolph said. “How the score comes together is never going to be the same twice.”
The score, as such, is minimal, which is why he appreciated the skills that Raga Massive brought to his work. Having trained in an oral tradition, members of the group picked up Rudolph’s compositional process quickly. The cornerstone of Indian classical improvisation is the raga—an established melody, rhythmic phrase and mood all in one, Rudolph explained, and “a ragmala is where advanced players improvise on more than one raga in their performances.”
For Rudolph, who’s spent two decades studying Hindustani tabla (North Indian drumming), the collaboration with musicians who understood this kind of spontaneous composition “made a lot of sense.”
Jazz drummer Sameer Gupta, a tabla player with the collective, agreed. “Adam is definitely hip to Indian classical music,” he said. “He understands the beauty and expansiveness of those ancient melodies.”
Rudolph’s process also aligns with the collective’s mission of creating raga-inspired music, even if the edges that define Indian classical music get a little blurry.
“I think that Adam is stretching for something beyond the sphere of what we can even hope to hold some sort of standard to,” Gupta opined. “He’s bringing together so many different streams, everything from West African music to Indian classical music to contemporary improvisational music to orchestral music—it ceases to be any one thing.”
Not any one thing, perhaps, but no idle gambit, either. “When you listen to John Coltrane or Miles Davis or Yusef Lateef, you’re hearing very singular, very powerful, very individualistic voices,” Rudolph asserted. “Because their voices are so individualistic, they actually tap into a universal feeling that connects us. That’s the humanity of it.” DB
“Watching people like Max Roach or Elvin Jones and seeing how they utilize the whole drum kit in a very rhythmic and melodic way and how they stretched time — that was a huge inspiration to me,” Hussain said in DownBeat.
Dec 17, 2024 9:58 AM
Tabla master Ustad Zakir Hussain, one of India’s reigning cultural ambassadors and a revered figure worldwide…
Gerald and John Clayton at the family home in Altadena during a photo shoot for the June 2022 cover of DownBeat. The house was lost during the Los Angeles fires.
Jan 21, 2025 7:54 PM
Roy McCurdy and his wife had just finished eating dinner and were relaxing over coffee in their Altadena home, when he…
“She said, ‘A lot of people are going to try and stop you,’” Sheryl Bailey recalls of the advice she received from jazz guitarist Emily Remler (1957–’90). “‘They’re going to say you slept with somebody, you’re a dyke, you’re this and that and the other. Don’t listen to them, and just keep playing.’”
Feb 3, 2025 10:49 PM
In the April 1982 issue of People magazine, under the heading “Lookout: A Guide To The Up and Coming,” jazz…
The Old Country: More From The Deer Head Inn arrives 30 years after ECM issued the Keith Jarret Trio live album At The Deer Head Inn.
Jan 21, 2025 7:38 PM
Last November, Keith Jarrett, who has not played publicly since suffering two strokes in 2018, greenlighted ECM to drop…
“With jazz I thought it must be OK to be Black, for the first time,” says singer Sofia Jernberg.
Jan 2, 2025 10:50 AM
On Musho (Intakt), her recent duo album with pianist Alexander Hawkins, singer Sofia Jernberg interprets traditional…