Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle, Washington
That’s partly due to Rudresh’s music—an exciting hybrid that
combines the traditional rhythmic and melodic organizing principles of
Hindustani and Carnatic music with the contemporary, idiomatic instrumentation
of jazz—but equally his adeptness at articulating what he’s attempting to do,
that resonated so well with our students. Rudresh’s “project” is a conscious
effort to define a personal as well as a musical identity. A hybrid music for a
“post-racial” America, an America where by 2042, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, for the first time in our history America’s “minority”
populations will become a majority of our nation.
There was a point in Friday’s workshop when Pakistani-American Rez Abbasi inadvertently referred to himself as an Indian-American—a gaffe that elicited a smirk from Rudresh. It was telling, because in Rez’s story relating how he’d grown up in the U.S. listening to Eddie Van Halen and Allan Holdsworth, such a distinction really didn’t matter—in a geographically challenged America the average citizen would be hard put to locate either India or Pakistan on a map. Yet both nations, borne out of a shared cultural history stretching back over 3,000 years, have been at the brink of war for almost as long as Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East. Hence, the implied irony in the group’s name: the Indo-Pak Coalition.
Jazz, of course, is a product of this collision of cultures, one borne out of a history of forced migration and subjugation. However, today’s musical miscegenation arises out of different circumstances, a world where the Internet, and the rise of global communications over the past two decades, makes geography irrelevant. Music, after all, defies national borders.
Photo by Michelle Smith-Lewis courtesy of Cornish College of the Arts.
