“How do you combine a harmony-rich tradition like jazz, with a melody-rich – or shruti-rich – tradition like Carnatic music?” asks saxophonist Prasant Radhakrishnan. “That’s kind of like the core question, right?”
One of the few exponents of Carnatic jazz on the saxophone, Radhakrishnan was speaking to me from his Dublin home via Zoom. His solution to the problem is to err towards the Carnatic genre by prioritizing the raga before anything else.
Carnatic music is an extremely technical form of Indian classical music, in which artists strive to attain an almost virtuosic command over their voice or instrument. Compositions are rigorously bound by certain rules, but there is ample scope for improvisation within that context. Equally technical, jazz arrangements are driven by frenetic chord changes and improvisation. Fusing these two genres into one coherent sound is an exacting task, but one that Radhakrishnan assumes with skill and flair.
“To me, one of the most special things about Carnatic music is the character of the raga. Each raga has its own feel, and some of the ragas are very, very subtle and complex.”
His approach is to erect a musical scaffolding using the harmonies, rhythm, and feel of jazz, and then build a melody upon it that preserves the essence of the raga. He slows down chord changes, allowing the raga full expression. And when the chord does change, it is in service of the change in melody, often in an altogether different raga.
“So it’s like raga changes, instead of chord changes.”
If all of this sounds complex, it’s because it is. But one would be forgiven for thinking otherwise watching Radhakrishnan and his Carnatic jazz ensemble VidyA live in concert.
Onstage, VidyaA – Radhakrishnan, along with drummer and percussionist Sameer Gupta, and double bassist David Ewell – seem effortless. Music lovers were treated to a sparkling ensemble performance when the trio played the Community Music Center in the Mission District on May 4.
While Gupta and Ewell set down an appropriately jazzy framework for the first composition, Paavanaguru, Radhakrishnan expertly explored the tenets of the Hamsanandi raga, his fingers gliding up and down the black-and-gold saxophone, displaying a dexterity and ease that comes from decades of practice.
VidyA formed as a three-piece Carnatic jazz ensemble in 2005. After hundreds of live shows, two albums dense with innovative musical ideas, and an EP, the three musicians went on an unplanned hiatus around 2018. Now, under the aegis of the San Francisco International Arts Festival, VidyA was back.
The Saxophonist From Phoenix
In elementary school in Phoenix, Arizona, Radhakrishnan had the option to learn an instrument for band practice. When his father asked him what instrument he wanted to learn, he promptly chose the saxophone.
“He asked me, ‘Are you sure about that?’ I said, ‘Yep. I’m sure,” he recounts after two decades of being a professional saxophonist. “And I can’t really say why!”
Outside of band practice, Phoenix’s thriving Indian Classical music scene meant that Radhakrishnan could see great Carnatic music performers live. The turning point came when in the eighth grade, he met with the pioneer of Carnatic saxophone, Kadri Gopalnath, who was visiting the home of a family friend.
During a brief interaction and an introductory lesson in Carnatic music, Gopalnath saw potential in the young boy and invited Radhakrishnan to become his student in India. That summer, the 13-year old made the trip to Mangalore, India, and stayed with Gopalnath, training intensely every day. He calls it a semi-gurukula vaasam, referring to the traditional system in which disciples live with their guru and train rigorously for 12 years.
“He took me as his own family,” said Radhakrishnan about the time spent in Gopalnath’s home.
For the next four years, Radhakrishnan returned to India during the holidays, strengthening his Carnatic foundation with each passing year. “There are a lot of a-ha! moments in learning Carnatic music on the saxophone,” he explains, “because the instrument is not designed for Carnatic music.”
Adapting features of Carnatic music – like complex gamakas or embellishments to connect two or more notes – on the saxophone was exciting but Radhakrishnan had greater musical ambitions.
While training with Gopalnath through his teens, Radhakrishnan was also building on the rudiments of jazz that he studied at band practice. After high school, he recorded his first album of Carnatic saxophone; but also chose Jazz Studies as his minor in college. He meditated over old recordings of his guru Gopalnath, but also gorged on jazz greats like Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Cannonball Adderley.
Training in both genres was overwhelming but through experiments in college Radhakrishnan could tell that blending the two genres could unlock new levels in his music.
“I started hearing different kinds of sounds, different types of melodies and combinations of rhythms and things like that, and they started forming in compositions,” he said. “I definitely had a feeling that I wanted to get this music out there.”
The breakthrough came in 2005 when Radhakrishnan met Sameer Gupta. Their musical wavelengths matched and the Carnatic jazz experiment was on. When David Ewell joined them, VidyA was born.
Carnatic Jazz – Greater Than the Sum Of Its Parts
At the concert, the ensemble put their versatility on show. After Paavanaguru, Radhakrishnan introduced Lost Tales from the ensemble’s eponymous first album in 2008. For this composition, Gupta eschewed his sticks and used brushes and even his hands to lay down an atmospheric rhythm section with Ewell’s thumping bass while Radhakrishnan played dense, melodic lines, effortlessly switching between octaves.
The next song, The Divine Raft Carries You, felt like listening to a prog rock musical saga. Every time I thought I grasped the mood of the song, it changed completely as Radhakrishnan expertly segued into a different raga. With each alternation, he challenged the audience to predict when the next one was coming.
In another composition titled DSH, Gupta and Ewell led the way. Gupta laid down a steady rhythm in the odd time signature of 9/8, upon which Ewell played a catchy bass line, with subtle variations each time. Radhakrishnan joined in and added another layer of intricacy by playing a triplet melody, tying up a wonderfully syncopated musical experience of jazz and Carnatic music.
Though the three musicians make it look easy, these are complex compositions with key changes, odd time signatures, and granular melodic embellishments sprinkled throughout. To pull it off, the three need to perfectly lock into each other’s cues.
“There’s a lot of times when we’re improvising together, but then there’ll be a certain piece where you have to go to the next section. There’s no clear indicator when that’s going to be but I always notice whenever we’re going to that next section, we all go at the same time, without any communication,” said Radhakrishnan. “I think that’s something really valuable to have in a group.”
Their understanding comes from countless hours spent jamming, experimenting, and recording music as VidyA. The group’s approach to melding the two musical styles – keeping the flavor of jazz but substituting the rapid chord changes with subtle raga changes – is elegant on paper, and even more impressive to watch. With so many moving parts built into the song, at any given moment, I was at a loss to figure out whose hands to focus on.
“I feel like that was a really fun, really beautiful moment for all of us to come back and play,” said Radhakrishnan about the reunion concert and the chances of the trio playing more regularly. “We don’t have anything particular scheduled, but I think it’ll just happen naturally.”
Life goes on
The last time Radhakrishnan held a conventional nine-to-five job was right before he formed VidyA in 2005. It had nothing to do with music – he worked as a private investigator with a firm in San Francisco!
“My sister lived in the Bay Area and I had visited her here a few times and I kind of liked the area. She encouraged me to move out here and I ended up getting this job!” he said.
Soon after VidyA happened, Radhakrishnan took a leap of faith, quitting his day job to pursue music full-time. Since then, he has been composing, performing, and recording music, as a solo artist and as a collaborator on others’ musical projects.
His attitude to music and its function in his life has evolved considerably.
“Society is very goal-oriented in today’s world, so you start off and think you have to do this, make a career, become successful, and accomplish a particular thing and that means you’ve done well,” he said. “By playing music more and more, it did something to me… now I see that it [music] has a number of functions, but one of the most important ones is that it’s a tool for self-discovery.”
Radhakrishnan describes his approach to music as more spiritual than before. It is liberating, he says, to divorce his music from any expectations, and focus on the enjoyment he derives from it.
He now has a wife and two children, with whom he lives in Dublin.
“Life informs the music also,” he said. “So I’m not touring and performing as extensively and actually after I had my kids, I started teaching a lot more.”
In the Indian Classical tradition, gurus pass down musical knowledge, a mantle Radhakrishnan wears for the Carnatic saxophone. He sees teaching as his responsibility – a way to keep his own guru’s teachings alive through the next generation of Carnatic saxophonists.
He also sees the saxophone as a novel way to introduce young musicians in the United States to the Indian Classical tradition, an instrument that they can pick up in band practice, just like he did.
“It’s important to make it available to people because some of my students might not have learned Carnatic music at all, if it wasn’t on the saxophone,” he said. “There’s actually a huge opportunity for an instrument like the saxophone, to bring Carnatic music, or at least the concepts within it, or the ideas, and the musical elements in it to a very large number of people.”
To learn more about Prasant Radhakrishnan and VidyA’s music, click here.
