PROFILE: RUDRESH › CONTINUED FROM PAGE 34
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36 CITY • JAZZ FESTIVAL GUIDE 2013
few Ravi Shankar albums. But mostly he listened to Top 40 radio. He began clarinet lessons in fourth grade with a teacher who turned him on to a variety of music without pigeonholing it. “We didn’t talk about Sidney Bechet being traditional and Sonny Stitt being hard-bop, we just listened to music. I didn’t know that what Ornette Coleman did was considered avant-garde until I went to college. I saw it in the same stream as Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington.” His first saxophone heroes were Grover Washington Jr. and David Sanborn. “That’s the stuff that made me want to play the saxophone,” Mahanthappa says. “The first concert I ever went to was Grover. He’s an important figure in black music. It was instrumental soul; it wasn’t smooth jazz. It hadn’t had the soul sucked out of it yet. And the Brecker Brothers…when I first heard Michael Brecker, I said I want to play saxophone that well. Then I heard Charlie Parker and it was over.” He began college at North Texas State University, finished at Berklee College of Music, and earned his master’s degree at De Paul University in Chicago. He moved to New York City in 1997 and started an ascent in the jazz world that shows no sign of slowing down. Last month Mahanthappa won a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. The $275,000 prize, given to artists in dance, jazz, theater, and interdisciplinary work, is an investment in their careers, providing them with the means to take risks. Mahanthappa will continue to experiment in his various ensembles, but one thread will run through all of them. “To me the whole relationship to India is at the core of finding identity,” he says. Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Gamak takes place Thursday, June 27, 7 p.m. & 9:15 p.m. at The Little Theatre (240 East Ave.). Tickets cost $20-$25, or you can use your Club Pass.