A Passage to India.(alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa and his new album Kinsmen)

Jazz musicians have two fundamental goals: creating music that keeps listeners wondering what's next, and finding a novel context within which to explore old truths. (There are no new truths.) Whenever a musician achieves this synthesis, usually after years of apprenticeship and exploration, a rumble echoes through the jazz world. Such a rumble was heard last fall, when the thirty-seven-year-old alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa released an astonishing album, "Kinsmen," on a small New York-based label (Pi), quickly followed by another no less astonishing, "Apti," on a small Minnesota-based label (Innova). The breakthrough had been a long time coming, and, curiously enough, it justifies ethnic assumptions that Mahanthappa had for much of his career been working to escape. With a name that may require concentration (second syllables are accented: Ru-dresh Ma-hahn-tha-pa), he has often been presumed to be an Indian-born saxophonist involved in some kind of Indian-jazz fusion, but he is actually as American as apple pie, or Barack Obama. For more than a decade, in close association with a contemporary of similar background, the pianist and composer Vijay Iyer, he had circled classical Indian music with cautious respect, reluctant to exploit a tradition about which he knew little.

Born in 1971, Mahanthappa grew up in Boulder, in one of the very few Indian-American families there. He studied Baroque recorder for two years, then switched to alto saxophone at the age of eleven, coming under the influence of a teacher who exposed him to everything from Sidney Bechet to Frank Zappa. By ninth grade, Mahanthappa was fronting a band that, by his own account, tortured tunes by Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and others he admired. He graduated from Berklee College of Music, and went on to earn a master's in jazz composition at DePaul University, in Chicago. Through the alto saxophonist Steve Coleman, whose M-Base collective inspired many young musicians in the nineteen-nineties, Mahanthappa met Iyer, and they could scarcely believe that there were two jazz musicians of South Indian heritage with routinely mispronounced names. They learned a lot from each other; Iyer focussed on rhythm and Mahanthappa on melody, and when they heard of an opportunity to play in Toronto they rehearsed for three days and made their debut as a duo.

Both men were suspicious of the Indian borrowings that had become commonplace in jazz since the sixties, and which usually produced oil-and-water confrontations or mannerly gimmicks--a tabla in the rhythm section, say. Mahanthappa was also wary of Coltrane's use of Indian ragas--ancient scales that, unlike Western ones, are wedded to drones rather than harmony, which doesn't exist in classical Indian music--and of his attempt to invoke the sound of the double-reed shehnai with his soprano saxophone. Moving to New York in 1997, Mahanthappa performed and recorded prolifically with Iyer, producing an impressive series of CDs--including the duo album "Raw Materials," Iyer's "Blood Sutra," and Mahanthappa's "Black Water," "Mother Tongue," and "Codebook." To the degree that they borrowed anything from South India, it was subsumed by the sheer ebullience they brought to playing jazz--Iyer with his percussive attack, rangy moods, and fastidious wit (a recent composition is "Macaca Please"), and Mahanthappa with his lavish timbre, which places particular emphasis on the often neglected lower register of his instrument, and his ability to convey a state of elation.

While Mahanthappa was at Berklee, his older brother teasingly gave him an album called "Saxophone Indian Style," by Kadri Gopalnath. As far as Mahanthappa knew, "Indian saxophonist" was an oxymoron, but the album amazed him. Gopalnath, who was born in 1950, in Karnataka, plays a Western instrument in a non-Western context--the Carnatic music of Southern India (distinct from the Hindustani musical tradition of Northern India). Gopalnath, who generally plays in a yogalike seated position, has perfected something that jazz saxophonists have been attempting for decades: moving beyond the Western chromatic scale into the realm of microtones, a feat harder for wind instruments, whose keys are in fixed positions, than for strings or voice. Jazz players, such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Albert Ayler, had gone about it by varying intonation, blowing multiphonics (two or more notes at the same time), or squawking in the upper register, where pitches are imprecisely defined. Gopalnath does none of that. Using alternate fingerings and innovative embouchure techniques, he maintains faultless intonation while sliding in and out of the chromatic scale.

Mahanthappa resolved to work with Gopalnath, using a grant to finance a visit to India. Then he immersed himself in Carnatic music, studying instrumental techniques, the infinitely complex system of ragas, and the ...