Dreaming of the Masters

Last week, I said that nobody went deeper into Middle East music that John Handy.  That's not true.  That was an overstatement to make a point about that particular post, but it's simply not true.

The jazz guitarist Jon McLaughlin at one point abandoned his highly popular fusion outfit, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, to form an acoustic band with tabla player Zakir Hussain.  Their music was deeply Asian, so much so that it became hard to call it "jazz" anymore and it's usually filed under "world music" these days.

Similarly, the band Oregon had strong Indian and middle eastern elements to their music, mixing sitar with jazz guitar and Indian percussion, but that band took some odd turns along the way and played music that most people now recognize as "new age" rather than jazz.

John Handy's Karuna Supreme was definitely a jazz album, and Handy's alto most decidedly swung in front of a backdrop of Indian rhythm and in counterpart to Ali Akbar Khan's sarod.  But Handy also maintained an career playing outstanding post-bop and hard bop jazz, so it's hard to give him the title of the one who went deepest into the Eastern sound.

Meanwhile, the innovative trumpeter and multi-instrumentalist Don Cherry also incorporated Indian, near- and mid-Eastern, and tribal elements into jazz music, producing a sound that was original, informed by various cultures, but still recognizably "jazz."  I don't know if it's even possible to say who went the deepest into Eastern music, but no meaningful conversation on this topic can exclude Don Cherry and have any credibility.     

Here's Malkauns from his mind-blowing Brown Rice album, featuring the impressive bass playing of Charlie Haden and daughter Moki Cherry on tambura.