Indo-Jazz Suite in Bloomington, MN

At long last, Caribbean saxophonist
Joe Harriott
's classic collaboration with Calcutta composer and conductor
John Mayer
is back in print on this
Koch
CD reissue of the original
Atlantic
LP from 1967. In England in the 1960s,
Harriott
was something of a vanguard wonder on the order of
Ornette Coleman
. And while the comparisons flew fast and furious and
was denigrated as a result, the two men couldn't have been more different. For one thing,
was never afraid to
swing
. This work, written and directed by
Mayer
, offered the closest ever collaboration and uniting of musics East and West. Based almost entirely in the five-note
raga
-- or tonic scale that Indian
classical
music emanates from -- and Western
modalism
, the four
ragas
that make up the suite are a wonder of tonal invention and
modal
complexity, and a rapprochement to Western harmony. The band
assembled here included his own group -- pianist
Pat Smythe
, bassist
Coleridge Goode
, and drummer
Allan Ganley
-- as well as trumpeter
Kenny Wheeler
, flutist
Chris Taylor
,
Diwan Mothar
on sitar,
Chandrahas Paiganka
on tamboura, and
Keshan Sathe
on tabla, with
playing violin and
on his alto. Of the four pieces, the
"Overture"
and
"Contrasts"
are rooted in
blues
, though they move from one set of ascending and descending notes to the other, always ending on the tonic, and involve more than the five, six, or seven notes of Indian
music, while the latter two --
"Raga Megha"
"Raga Gaud-Saranga"
-- are out to lunch in the Western musical sensibility and throw all notions of Western harmony out the window. The droning place of the tamboura and the improvising sitar and alto shift the scalar notions around until they reflect one another in interval and mode, creating a rich, mysterious tapestry of sonic inquiry that all but folds the two musics into one another for good. Amazing. ~ Thom Jurek