What a magical night’s music! The group called Megha, featuring Dr Suma Sudhindra on the veena and Gerard Machado on guitar fronting a band of eight who fused Indian classical music and jazz, left a Standing Room Only audience at Opus breathless with wonder at the beauty of their work.
Certainly, I haven't experienced anything quite as fascinating, involving, uplifting as the music and the professional skills on display.
Six decades ago, an Anglo-Indian violinist came out of the slums of Calcutta’s docklands and made his way to London’s renowned Trinity College on a music scholarship. His name was John Mayer and in time he went on to become one of the best-known resident composers of the London Symphony Orchestra. But the music that Johnny listened to in his head and his heart was rooted in Indian classical traditions. So, at the height of his influence in the mid-60s, along with a West Indian alto saxophonist called Joe Harriott, he formed what was surely the world’s first fusion band. Charles Fox, a respected British writer on jazz, had this to say about the Indo-Jazz Double Quartet:
“Nothing does the art of a nation so much good as letting foreigners in. In the 1960s … musicians of all kinds became properly aware of Oriental music, especially Indian. As well as using a raga instead of a harmonic sequence, Indian music …exploits rhythms more complex than Westerners are used to. Indo-Jazz Fusions, a double quartet, went in for face-to-face confrontation, with Indian and jazz musicians playing alongside one another.”
Johnny’s double quartet made several recordings over a few years and I was privileged to attend one of them over three days in London. Those memories flooded my mind yesterday at Opus and I thought to myself that the spirit of my friend John Mayer, who was killed in a hit and run accident outside his London home last year, must surely have hovered over us as we enjoyed Megha’s music.
I am not specially knowledgeable in Indian classical music but one needed little specialised knowledge to appreciate the wonderful Suma Sudhindra and her accompanists Sri. B.C Manjunath on mridangam, M.A. Krishnamurthy on tabla, B.K. Chandramouli kanjira and konekol and S. N. Narayanamurthy on ghatam.
The shy, self-effacing Gerard Machado has long been a stalwart of Bangalore’s near non-existent jazz scene. His trio, featuring nephew Tillu on drums and KN Prakash on 5-string bass guitar, were a joy to watch and listen to. But when these two discrete elements came together, they produced a whole that was so many multiples of its parts. Each song was a delight. For me at least, it provided the perfect justification, if one was indeed necessary, for an Indo-Jazz fusion so hopelessly in disarray after the imbecilic offerings of the Anoushka Shankar group just a few weeks ago.
This Suma-Gerard agglomeration is a group hugely deserving of a wider audience, beyond Bangalore and beyond India. Twenty-five years ago, I was privileged to push the wonderful Carnatic singer Ramamani onstage at the jazz festival I helped run in Calcutta, to join the young Louis Banks Quintet and their singer Pam Crain in a spontaneous scat session. It brought the house down. It also launched that particular aspect of Rama’s (and her ghatam playing husband Mani’s) forays into fusion music that has taken them to many celebrated performances at jazz festivals in Europe and the USA – and also a few months ago in Bangalore, at Opus, with their friend the internationally-celebrated alto saxophonist Charlie Mariano.
It would be a cruelly unfair world if the same recognition didn’t happen to Suma Sudhindra and Gerard Machado.
But for now, certainly last night, God was in his heaven and all was very well with the world.
