Dreaming of the Masters

Many of the early entries in this Old School Friday series of posts about music I used to listen to back in the 1970s had strong spiritual themes and Middle Eastern influences, from Abdullah Ibraham's Ishmael to Pharoah Sanders' Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah to Alice Coltrane's Journey in Satchidananda.  Few musicians went deeper into the Middle East, though, than John Handy.

Handy had a fairly popular song in the mid-late 70's, a jazz-funk tune called Hard Work based on a repeated call-and-response blues riff.  It got some radio play, and my girlfriend, who generally hated jazz, loved the song Hard Work, and agreed to go to the Village Vanguard with me one night to see Handy play.  He performed Hard Work and the other fusion-ish songs off his popular album of the same name, which is what the audience wanted and which is what made him some money.  Nothing wrong with that - a man's got to make a living.  

Here's the amazing part, though - Handy apparently recognized us from the stage as ardent fans of his music, and came to our table between sets, and sat down and talked with us.  He was a terrific, kind man, and he answered my question by telling me that of his many recordings (he once played in Charles Mingus' band and had led his own quintet in a set at the 1966 Monterey Jazz Festival), the one he was most proud of was his collaboration with Ali Akbar Khan called Karuna Supreme (karuna, I later learned, is Sanskrit for "compassion').   I finally bought a copy a few years later (obscure jazz albums were hard to come by in those days before the internet).

Here's the title cut of Karuna Supreme, with Zakir Hussain's complex and incredible tabla and the near telepathic interplay of Handy's alto and Ali Akbar Khan's sarod.