{"id":224,"date":"2009-04-21T21:38:21","date_gmt":"2009-04-22T01:38:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/?p=224"},"modified":"2009-04-21T21:38:21","modified_gmt":"2009-04-22T01:38:21","slug":"carrying-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/?p=224","title":{"rendered":"Carrying on…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"trilok_gurtu_2big\"<\/a>\"zawinul_portrait_2003\"<\/a>I’ve been listening to a lot of Zawinul lately, Weather Report, Syndicate, solo work – I’ve been consuming it all.\u00a0 According to my last.FM stats<\/a>, I’ve listened to Weather Report and Zawinul (songs) 59 times in the last seven days.\u00a0 The next closest is a Roy Buchanan album that has fourteen songs.\u00a0 So, I’ve been focusing.<\/p>\n

Zawinul, like John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams, Chic Corea, and numerous others, worked with Miles Davis in the crucible period from 1969 to 1971.\u00a0 All of these musicians either toured or recorded with Miles during that period and each went on to a very successful solo career and group work immediately after their time with Miles.<\/p>\n

Zawinul’s story is a dream come true.\u00a0 He was born poor in Austria in 1932.\u00a0 During the war, his neighborhood was bombed and people did not know if they would live or die from day to day.\u00a0 The young Zawinul proved to be a talented keyboard player and studied American Jazz with the hope that he would one day come to the USA and play jazz with black musicians.\u00a0 His dream came true and he got hooked up with Cannonball Adderley in the 60’s.\u00a0 The result of that musical collaboration was, among other things, a new direction in jazz as Mercy, Mercy, Mercy became a huge hit.\u00a0 Zawinul was the sole composer.<\/p>\n

After a long and productive stint with Cannonball, Zawinul played with Miles Davis on In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew.\u00a0 Again, contributed musical compositions, as well as his signature keyboard chops, carving out rhythm and melody with a restrained, yet powerful hand.\u00a0 Those two Miles Davis records changed everything, not just in Jazz, but in every form of popular music.\u00a0 The electrified force that powered Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock and the Who at Leeds was also available to jazz musicians.\u00a0 Zawinul, in his way, took this further than any Western musician.<\/p>\n

Weather Report started out international and only got more so.\u00a0 Zawinul and Shorter used touring the world as an investment in their musical futures.\u00a0 At every tour stop, the exploration took place both on and off the stage.\u00a0 They celebrated music by including everything and everyone.\u00a0 That’s the musical environment in which Joe Zawinul’s voice matured to adulthood.<\/p>\n

And where Weather Report showed some natural excess that went with it’s huge success, Zawinul’s work beyond that band returns the focus to mixing and matching styles to find the common music of love and love of music.\u00a0 A few months before he died in 2007, Zawinul was still on tour and still tearing it up with the latest edition of his band.\u00a0 This performance<\/a> shows that the fire and the fury and the intergalactic boogie woogie that turned the whole world into his corner jam session.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to Trilok.\u00a0 Born into a prosperous and musical family in Bombay in 1951.\u00a0 He developed skills with Indian percussion, especially the tabla, and had a keen feel for the improvisation that is part of the traditional Indian Raga.\u00a0 He also loved the music emerging from the West, including Jimi Hendrix.\u00a0 Over the past thirty years, he has taken the generic term world-music and turn it on its head.\u00a0 This is a real<\/em><\/strong> case of east meets west.<\/p>\n

Music is spirit, music is love, music is god.\u00a0 It is a language shared across continents and between men and women who are standing inches apart.\u00a0 An audience communes with a live performance; the band members find each other for the first time every time<\/em> they take the stage.\u00a0 There is no classification; there is no exclusivity; everyone is welcome – all styles, all colors, all continents, all religions, all instruments.<\/p>\n

Zawinul, I don’t think, was too worried about all this spirituality, but he lived it.\u00a0 He had tremendous success with this formula.\u00a0 And while it cannot be ignored that his sense of melody as poetry was absoutely sublime, it is the comingling of that dramatic sense with the openness of a world citizen, which made him iconic.\u00a0 The hat, the mustache, it only worked because he gave it meaning.<\/p>\n

Trilok may not have Jozy’s uncanny ability with melody, but he happens to have otherworldy talent that even he acknowledges.\u00a0 He speaks of his own ability as ‘virtuoso’ without it sounding excessive or self-serving.\u00a0 And he’s trying to hold it all back and let his supporting cast carry the tune, but invariably Gurtu’s thunderous percussion comes flying in with perfect accuracy and passion.\u00a0 When I hear his music, I am moved by the performer’s ecstatic experience.\u00a0 No one in the band, it seems is from the same country as any other member.\u00a0 No one is a native English speaker, but everyone speaks English, probably better than I do.<\/p>\n

I got to see Trilok in an ‘acoustic’ perofrmance of the John McLaghlin Trio back in the early 90’s.\u00a0 That was the breakthrough tour when he really came out to the world.\u00a0 It was a huge tour, with radio and TV support in some places.\u00a0 Ever since I first saw this little man running wildly between tablas, western drums (but no stool!), a pale of water and various gongs, mallets, shakers and other indescribable objects, ever since then, I have been fascinated.\u00a0 I purchased a few of his early records, but at the time found them to be too fusion-y.\u00a0 The percussion was intense, but the rest of it sounded a bit like smooth jazz.\u00a0 Something wasn’t clicking.<\/p>\n

I remembered his work a year or two ago and heard the new project, which featured a string quartet to accompany Trilok’s madness.\u00a0 The album<\/a> shows a beautiful sense of melody and takes advantage of the soft and sweet sound that a classical [western] configuration could do with ‘world-music’ and jazz.\u00a0 It works extremely well.<\/p>\n

Now, after listening to so much Zawinul and Weather Report, I’m finally listening to Trilok’s more recent output – and now it all makes sense.\u00a0 That sound that Zawinul created was a combination of traditional instruments playing modern sounds.\u00a0 Zawinul, on the other hand, was playing ancient melodies and rhythms on the most modern keyboards and sythesizers.\u00a0 He used his unique talent to put musicians into a place they didn’t recognize.\u00a0 The result was often something unexpected and almost always something exciting.<\/p>\n

Zawinul is gone now, almost two years.\u00a0 But I must believe that he serves a Trilok’s yard-stick.\u00a0 So much of what they do is the same.\u00a0 They are musicians that developed a whole new approach to their instruments, that it failed to fit any category or classification.\u00a0 They traveled around the world, albeit in different directions, and absorbed everything they tasted, saw and heard.\u00a0 They assembled band after band after band, all different and all extraordinary.\u00a0 They never compromised.<\/p>\n

Trilok’s new album ‘Massical’ is coming out on in the first or second week of May<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been listening to a lot of Zawinul lately, Weather Report, Syndicate, solo work – I’ve been consuming it all.\u00a0 According to my last.FM stats, I’ve listened to Weather Report and Zawinul (songs) 59 times in the last seven days.\u00a0 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[23],"tags":[270,271,272],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=224"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":227,"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions\/227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}