Alto saxophonist
Rudresh Mahanthappa arrived in New York City in 1997 from Boulder, Colorado, and immediately began to integrate himself into the jazz scene as a sideman. His distinctive sound is matched only by his ambitious manner of melding the modernist jazz tradition with South Indian music and electronic sounds -- all depending on which ensemble he heads. After his birth in Trieste, Italy, his family moved to Boulder and he spent his early years growing up in Colorado, taking up the saxophone as a teen. He later studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston and DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois.
In New York, work as a sideman was steady, but his true passion was to become a bandleader, something he attempted on his debut album, Yatra. Although the album was received well, the limited distribution kept
Mahanthappa's name from wide recognition and he stayed in the area to continue performing. More side work and a teaching gig kept him busy, but in 2002 he came back to the studio and laid down Black Water for Red Giant Records, and his fortunes began to change as his reputation grew.
In 2004,
Mahanthappa began a tenure with Pi Recordings, issuing
Mother Tongue with his trio that included pianist
Vijay Iyer and drummer
Elliot Humberto Kavee. Two years later he and
Iyer issued the duet offering Raw Materials, followed a few months later by
Codebook, a quartet with the pianist, bassist
François Moutin, and drummer
Dan Weiss. The latter disc was named among the finest jazz releases of the year by numerous publications. In 2007 he won a Guggenheim Fellowship for composition. One of
Mahanthappa's most acclaimed recordings,
Kinsmen with
Kadri Gopalnath and the Dakshina Ensemble (which included guitarist
Rez Abbasi), was a fusion of electric jazz and Carnatic music and proved to be one of his most influential recordings of 2008.
Abbasi and
Weiss became part of
Mahanthappa's widely celebrated Indo-Pak Coalition, issuing
Apti just before the year ended. The band toured clubs and festivals all across the globe.
Mahanthappa also joined
Jack DeJohnette's band for a time and finished his own tenure with Pi in 2010 with Apex, a co-headlining date with
Bunky Green that featured
DeJohnette, pianist
Jason Moran, and drummer
Damion Reid. Another co-led set,
Dual Identity with
Steve Lehman, was issued by Clean Feed that year and also featured
Reid.
Mahanthappa signed with ACT in 2011 and released
Samdhi, an energetic electro-acoustic quintet date with the leader on laptop as well as alto saxophone, guitarist
David Gilmore, electric bassist
Rich Brown, drummer
Reid, and "Anand" Anatha Krishman on mridangam and kanjira. Two years later he released
Gamak, with
Weiss,
Moutin, and guitarist
David Fiuczynski. The album was described by Jazz Times as "a landmark convergence of styles that didn't lend itself to easy analysis...new music of this caliber hasn't been attempted before."
It was the culmination of a period of grand achievement for
Mahanthappa. Not only had he won a Guggenheim Fellowship, but also a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and commissions from the Rockefeller Foundation MAP Fund, Chamber Music America, and the American Composers Forum. He was named alto saxophonist of the year three years running in Down Beat's International Critics Poll (2011-2013) and five years running by the Jazz Journalists Association (2009-2013). In April 2013, he received a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. With the exception of
Moutin,
Mahanthappa changed the lineup of his entire band for 2015's Bird Calls, utilizing an acoustic quintet featuring pianist
Matt Mitchell, trumpeter
Adam O'Farrill, and drummer
Rudy Royston. That same year he was part of the oddly named ten-piece all-saxophone group
PRISM Quartet for
Heritage/Evolution, Vol. 1 on Innova Recordings.
Mahanthappa spent much of the rest of the year touring with his own bands and composing. He emerged in the fall of 2017 with the self-released second Indo-Pak Coalition (again with
Abbasi and
Weiss) album, Agrima, on vinyl and digital only. The recording was featured as an NPR First Listen.
Mahanthappa is also chairman of the jazz department at Princeton University. ~ Bradley Torreano