Musical Masters Make SB Debut

Béla Fleck (banjo), Zakir Hussain (tabla), Edgar Meyer (double-bass), and Rakesh Chaurasia (flute) will perform for the first time in Santa Barbara on October 19 at UCSB Campbell Hall, coming in from their tour and work in Nashville on a new LP. With over 20 Grammy Awards collectively, we can expect this collaboration to be inspirational and a great positive sign that there are still new ways to create music in this millennium.

Zakir and I talked on the phone on how the quartet met, creates, and all things music:

Q. How did the quartet happen?

A. When the Nashville Symphony Orchestra (NSO) was building a new concert hall, they wanted to open with a new piece of music. They commissioned Béla and Edgar, who invited me to work with them on it. Our original focus was just this piece we would play with the NSO, being a trio wasn’t in our minds at the time. After we finished writing it, the NSO asked, will you be doing some original pieces of your own? We realized we did not have separate music for us to play, so we each of wrote three new pieces that once performed sparked us to want to write more together, make a record and go on tour. Our friendships strengthened to include our families, and we have played together 10 years now. We recently added Indian flute player Rakesh, nephew of renowned flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia, who is his teacher. I played with Hariprasad for 30 years, seen Rakesh grow up, he fits like a glove with our group. We are in Nashville now recording and rehearsing a new LP to be released in 2020. Halfway thru this tour we will return to the studio and finish the album.

Has Rakesh influenced the music in your group?

Yes. The banjo and bass instruments have both rhythm and melody, and the tabla is a basic rhythm instrument that also has tone and you can play notes on it. The banjo, tabla and bass can live in the rhythm mode and melody mode together. We needed a pure melodic instrument, a floating fluid element to our music and that became the addition of Rakesh. 

Béla mentioned in another interview, you hold the timing for the group…

(laughs) In the quartet, you’re dealing with instruments, all vocals, relying on resonance and a sound that has length and reach, which allows them to be able to in a leisurely way manipulate the movement to the passages of music. I, on the other hand, playing tabla never really had to deal with the long tones because that was already taken care of by the flute or sitar. But playing with Béla and Edgar, we accompany each other, and it became clear to me right away that I had to find a way not only to hold time for them, but there are situations where I have to provide tonal and harmonic support, a lesson that came to me watching Béla, whose instrument is staccato. He found a way to play [banjo] that is so melodic and so fluid. That was a lesson for me to apply to the way I play tabla now. For the last 10 years, my tabla playing has moved in an interesting direction where I am able to experience the repertoire of my tradition that has come to me by my father, not only in a rhythm pattern but also a harmonic pattern, looking at the rhythm pattern and recognizing melodies in that. Béla and Edgar are musicians who don’t just learn the piece, but experience and explore the piece in melodic form, rhythmic form and emotional content, and how to be able to bring out various nooks and corners in songs. It takes a very evolved person with the commitment and focus of lifetime to be able to unravel a song. Béla and Edgar are like that. We learn a song in 20 minutes and then take three to five hours just experiencing a song, like the way you look at a painting, seeing so many different shades and dimensions into it that you don’t see at the first glance.

What color is each instrument or in the group’s song?

We are like a rainbow, but we all come from just one color. Each one of us represent so many different shades of blue. Any group performance [music] eventually paints one color.

You’re creating a new genre of music, like Sun Ra or Miles?

When you talk about Sun Ra, Miles, Coltrane, Ravi or Charles Lloyd, these are people who sat on a shelf far above the mundane things in life, and then music represented that shelf that they were on. It was something way beyond anybody else, and those days the life was different; the music business was not the music business we know now. None of us today can live that way; today we get up and open our computers and check what emails we got, our credit scores, our credit card payment, and we check with our publicist what is going on with interviews, etc. There’s a whole set of other things we get involved with that have nothing to do with us actually sitting down and playing music. 

So for me to be able to dare to even consider that we in our world of music have a similar depth of vision or understanding of the arts as musicians of those times like Sun Ra, it’s hard for us to imagine that. The music today, the expression of the music and the transmission of the it has lost some of that pristineness, I must say that sadly, and we are all looking for that, we are all trying to see that clarity, it comes in spurts, in moments, in seconds, but for us to able to experience a long lengthy voyage through it, is something we can only dream of at this point.

Some of us get to the point where it is not necessary any more to impress anyone with our talents or virtuosity. Everything we want to say has to come from our heart and stand the test of time, something we can stand behind and say that’s exactly what we wanted to do. I’m arriving to a point where I am not threatened in the world of music to the best tabla player, be a technical marvel, I just want to be on stage and make music that makes me happy, and converse with my fellow musicians with no boundaries or hesitancy in our work. I am starting to see what my father was all about, the happiness he had in his relationship with his music and his instrument, the same way at age 75 as when he was 15.

In 1960s for two or three years, there was such love and incredible feeling of affection for your fellow human beings that existed; that’s all changed now. When I first arrived here [San Francisco] it used to be great musicians would hang out together in clubs, jam and play music, there was no question like I’m going to have to ask my booking agent or manager if I could make myself available, or is anybody recording it, what are the royalties, who’s going to get what, that wasn’t there in the old days. That kind of freedom of sharing, not just a plate of food, but your inner being which is your music, in an open and giving manner, is something that does not necessarily exist now. 

That’s why I thank my lucky stars that I worked with Ravi, Mikki Hart, John McLaughlin, Béla, and Edgar because these are relationships that have stood the test of time, 40 years down the road I’m still playing music with them and we are still looking at new ways to be able to tell the same old story. The understanding between us increasing a hundred fold because we’ve been together such a long time and that reflects in our music. I’m lucky I’m still with musicians who have that old system inside them.

411: www.artsandlectures.ucsb.edu; (805) 893-3535