Aakash Mittal
Aakash Mittal – “a fiery alto saxophonist and prolific composer,” notes the Minneapolis Star Tribune – has created a strikingly evocative portrait of urban India with Nocturne, the first album by his Awaz Trio featuring guitarist Miles Okazaki and percussionist Rajna Swaminathan (who plays the mridangam and kanjira). The album, to be released September 10, 2021 via Bandcamp, summons the teeming sound world of nighttime Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). About the project, Mittal says: “I wanted to explore ‘night music’ as not only being meditative, calm and peaceful, but also being full of density, collision, friction and dissonance. There’s the Western classical concept of the nocturne in music as with Chopin and others, of course, as well as the deep culture that surrounds jazz as a nighttime performance art. I wanted to combine those ideas with the Hindustani tradition of performing ragas at specific times of night. Each piece on the album explores and deconstructs a different evening and night raga that I studied with the sarod player Prattyush Banerjee in India. I took the shapes and intervals of each of these ragas, abstracted them and framed them in different contexts. There’s a lyricism that reflects the slow cadence of blue light melting into darkness, but there is also that aspect of energy, urgency and intensity that can rise with the urban nighttime in India.”
The Denver Post has pointed out that Mittal’s work “points toward new possibilities in improvised music… Through his balance of tough improvisation and bright harmonies – coupled with thorough investigations into the rhythms of India – he has already arrived at his own place in the jazz community.” Mittal credits the influence of such cross-cultural jazz luminaries as Vijay Iyer, Rudresh Mahanthappa and Hafez Modirzadeh, in addition to his studies with Hindustani master Prattyush Banerjee and the many opportunities the saxophonist had to perform with Indian icon Ravi Shankar’s former tabla maestro Tanmoy Bose, in his band Taal Tantra. Then there was influential tutelage from the late, great New York drumming sage Milfred Graves. About his time studying with Graves, Mittal says: “Professor Graves often challenged me to trust myself and the work I’m doing by saying that ‘everyone has something to contribute.’ I embraced this idea of trust by giving Miles and Rajna a lot of freedom to construct the music through improvisation within and around the scored material.”
Reflecting on his experiences of Kolkata, Mittal traces the genesis of Nocturne: “One night at the peak of Kolkata’s Durga Pooja festival, I boarded a bus heading down Rash Behari Avenue. The city’s population of 14 million had seemingly increased overnight with the addition of millions more tourists and visitors. As travelers continued to climb onto the bus, I became more and more compressed by the mass of bodies around me until the overwhelming volume of people in the gangway lifted me off of the floor. With one hand holding onto the bus railing, I became suspended by my fellow humans as we moved through a sonic landscape of traffic noise and pooja drumming. The human density, music and noise of my nighttime adventures in Kolkata informed the sound of Nocturne.”
