Download Chromatic Composer

Rez Abbasi
Chromatic Composer
R
ez Abbasi follows a self-imposed mandate
to balance the heartfelt and the theoretical
on his 2011 album Suno Suno (Enja). “If it ventures off too much either way, it loses me,” says
the guitarist. “I like being right in the middle.”
Abbasi recorded the album with his
Invocation quintet: Rudresh Mahanthappa
(alto saxophone), Vijay Iyer (piano), Johannes
Weidenmueller (bass) and Dan Weiss (drums).
The seven-tune suite contains much high-
obsessed rocker converted to jazz after hearing Joe Pass play with Ella Fitzgerald. Abbasi
assimilated the vocabularies of George
Benson, Pat Martino and Wes Montgomery,
and then pledged allegiance to Jim Hall for
his compositional approach to improvising.
Abbasi attended the University of Southern
California, studying guitar, conducting and
orchestration, and then enrolled at Manhattan
School of Music.
At 18, he met tabla master Zakir Hussain at
a house party; at 20, Abbasi started investigations into Indian classical music that included a year in India observing Hussain’s father,
Ustad Alla Rakha, and another year studying
tabla with one of Rakha’s disciples. However,
as indicated by the absence of overtly Indian
elements in his recordings until 2003’s Snake
Charmer (Earth Sounds), Abbasi was “apprehensive about applying Indian music to jazz”
fretted instrument, a continuous rather than
discrete approach to melody.”
Before a CD-release gig at New York’s Jazz
Standard in December, Abbasi—fresh from a
three-week sojourn as music director-guitarist for his wife, the vocalist Kiran Ahluwalia—
decided he had to go deep in the shed.
“My music is highly chromatic,” Abbasi
says. “Most of Kiran’s music is raga-based
or scale-based; you can’t veer too much, and
I yield to that approach. From that discipline
comes a great deal of character. But when I
play solos, I don’t like to think too much. It’s
got to be free. So when I got back, to get out of
those trenches, I practiced chromaticism.”
Born in Karachi, Pakistan, and raised in
Los Angeles, Abbasi, 45, heard Indian music
early on—his father, a doctor, liked to sing
ghazals around the house; aunts and uncles
sang at weddings. At age 16, the Van Halen-
“It had to be on a different level than John
Coltrane, who did the modal application of
Indian music as well as it can be done—or
Alice Coltrane or Shakti,” Abbasi explains.
“If you don’t have a fresh concept, what else
do you have? I continued to study it because I
love it.” He decided to let his knowledge surface after seeing Mahanthappa and Iyer perform as a duo—as well as a couple of groups
doing drum-and-bass themed Indian music—
in the early ’00s.
“I felt validated,” he recalls. “‘OK, these
guys are doing a good job at it, and I’ve got my
own ideas—and what am I waiting for?’ When I
met my wife, it was even more validation.
“Coltrane and Keith Jarrett are the pinnacle
because they’re not limited. They can play one
note at a time or a thousand notes. It’s not about
technique or playing fast. It’s about expression.”
—Ted Panken
KIRAN AHLUWALIA
grooves and scales of Indian qawwali music
(think Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan) with the structural language of modern jazz.
“Anybody can hire great musicians and
call it a group,” Abbasi says. “These guys internalize all kinds of music, and I want to use
that as much as I can. I also want to project
upon them my own concept. Here I wanted the
grooves to inform the full composition—something I’ve learned from listening to qawwali.
Writing is the one element that I can take my
time with and remanipulate as many times as
necessary before presenting the compositions.
Then I want them to do what they do—to interpret it any way they want.”
On both Suno Suno and the 2009 Sunnyside
CD Things To Come, the guitarist’s detailed
scores facilitate improvisational derring-do.
“The compositions are quite intricate, with
the piano part entirely written out, down to
the voicings I play,” Iyer remarks. “Some pieces are episodic—the notated material moves it
through two or three different zones, with shifts
in tempo and underlying groove. And when
Rez improvises, he’s deeply in the moment,