Take a deep breath. This is not a political post. It’s another post about music.

Indo-Pak Coalition is a current trio project that includes Rudresh Mahanthappa on saxophone, Rez Abbasi on guitar, and Dan Weiss on tabla. It’s just one of a number of fascinating, adventurous collaborations taking place on the creative-music scene these days. Along with his longtime collaborator, fellow-desi and piano genius Vijay Iyer, Rudresh is a regular on this scene and his work, whether in straight-ahead jazz or cross-genre collaborations, never fails to fascinate. He’s got a wonderful tone and attack that place him in the Coltrane legacy, and he’s done very thoughtful work that injects classical Indian concepts and themes into forward-looking contemporary jazz. Read more about him here, and about Pakistani-American guitarist Abbasi here.

Indo-Pak’s new suite “Apti” premieres tomorrow night, 5/31, at Joe’s Pub in NYC, and I encourage local Mutineers to join me there.

About the new project, Rudresh says this:

Mahanthappa is excited about his upcoming gig with the Indo-Pak Coalition: “It has this weird twist to it because, okay, you have this trio and the two brown guys are playing western instruments and the white guy’s playing an Indian instrument! [laughs] So it’s kind of funny and it’s interesting because Dan is an amazing drummer, but he’s also Samir Chatterjee’s most prized student; he’s a really monstrous tabla player, but he came out playing the tabla after playing drumset. And here we [Mahanthappa and Abbasi] are: we play these western instruments. So our perspectives are very different. It’s been really great to work with that group because we can talk about everything in very Indian terms—whether it’s Karnatic or Hindustani or whatever—and then we can turn around and talk about it in totally Western terms.”

This promises to be a great show. I hope to see you there! Continue reading →

I was saddened hear about the death of Desmond Dekker, one of the pioneers of the original Jamaican ska music scene (hear some of his music at Myspace). Ska, which Dekker and a handful of others invented in the early 1960s, is a kind of double-speed form of calypso that is generally upbeat and celebratory. It was a pop fad in Jamaica in the early 1960s that was reborn as a kind of multicultural pastiche in England with bands like Madness and The Specials in the late 1970s. Those bands were self-consciously racially integrated — often with black lead singers and white bandmates — and they were hugely commercially successful. The lead record label in this second wave of ska bands was 2 Tone Records, which got its name from its distinctive checkered logo, though “two tone” also clearly referred to the label’s multicultural, racially inclusive vibe.

I was a big fan of this type of music in high school and college, though I grew up during the ‘third wave’ of ska — after it had been reborn yet again as a kind of offshoot of American punk rock. As I bounced along to Operation Ivy in high school, I wondered: what about desi ska? The upbeat rhythm you find in The Specials (or earlier, in Desmond Dekker himself) is also key in Bhangra, and the two genres seem almost made for each other.

In fact, there was some ska-bhangra fusion back in the day, and there still is some today. If the mainstream record label was called 2 Tone Records, the desi version was Multitone Records, and it was founded in the early 1980s, just around when Brit-Asian Bhangra bands like Achanak and Premi were first starting to make records. (This was also, coincidentally, just after the peak of the 2-Tone Records era on the British music charts.) Continue reading →