Last month, we profiled new music-arts collective, HEARding Cats. And in that article, we promised you an interview with Ravish Momin of Trio Tarana, who's performing this Sunday, March 21, at the Kranzberg Arts Center (go to HEARDing Cats' website above for ticket info). So here is that interview, albeit much later than we wanted to deliver it. For best results, click on the "play" arrow on the video above while you're reading. The interview will make a lot more sense, because Momin is definitely a purveyor of the "familar-unfamiliar" -- his music is accessible, yet unlike anything you've heard before. Some background:
"Ravish Momin’s Trio Tarana, formed in 2003, is led by percussionist/composer Ravish Momin, born in India, while currently residing in New York City. Violinist Skye Steel, and Greg Heffernan (cello, electronics) round out the group. Their last stop in St. Louis came nearly 5 years ago, and the trio has been busy trotting the globe playing festivals ever since! The St. Louis stop for HEARding Cats will be one of only a handful of North American tour dates in 2010. The trio features the unique instrumentation of violin, cello, and percussion, and primarily utilizes East-Asian rhythms (including Indian, Japanese, Afghani), Middle-Eastern and North African rhythms as the foundation for a new creative musical experience. Click the following link for a video clip of a Trio Tarana piece based around a 13/8 rhythmic cycle, entitled Tehrah."
As you'll read, that album may not be representative of what you'll hear on Sunday. It's also very different from Momin's 2005 New Music Circle concert, but I'll let him tell the rest of that story...
So you’ve been in St. Louis before, with New Music Circle.
Yeah, that was a while ago (laughs). Five years ago.
So, for people who saw that show, how’s this going to differ?
It’s very different; actually, it’s a revamped trio, even though I’m still running it under the rubric of Trio Tarana. Now, we have the instrumentation of cello, violin and drum, but we’ve also added the elements of electronic loops and textures, and different background things. So we’ve taken that initial concept and played with it. It’s much more inclusive of other genres and ideas. It’s not just quote-unquote world music, if that makes any sense. People should just come with open ears. I call what we do “folk music from nowhere.” People always say, what do you mean by that? It’s sort of like folk music from a country that doesn’t exist. So elements of stuff people can recognize, whether it’s an Afghani folk melody, there’s elements of commonality in this music we try to draw on, so there’s always that catchiness to the songs, but at the same time we’re using rhythms based on African rhythms and funk rhythms and a lot of stuff that has that familiarity, but when you put the two together, it’s unfamiliar. That’s how I’ve been talking about it. So I guess it’s more in the pursuit of a particular sound, rather than a particular genre. We want to reach out to people, that’s the frustrating thing in this day and age, in this cloud of mainstream media, how do you get yourself positioned alongside Vampire Weekend or more established jazz things, or a more established word thing? Cause it really is all the above, and it’s honestly in Europe where the audience expects you to do something that’s much more genre bending or inclusive of different ideas. Having those rhythms creates a sort of familiarity, more so that the atonal or avant-garde stuff, so we try to make people understand that’s not what we’re doing.
I saw on the website, actually, you guys were playing with Shakira!
(Laughing.) Well, I did, yeah. That’s a different thing that has to do with having to wear different hats to survive in New York.
But it is still about crossing that border, and reminding people that music doesn’t have to have this vast chasm between skronk and bubblegum.
Absolutely -- why can’t pop music have these elements of all this other stuff and still be accessible, but not necessarily in this Beyonce-Lady Gaga kind of way? Again, in Europe it’s very different, not to harp on that, but the difference, it’s stark, between the U.S. and European approach. There, the same venue will bring in a singer/songwriter and a classical quartet. Or a rock band. Or a jazz band. Or something in-between. So they know they can have that’s going to be challenging. Even in New York, you go to a jazz club, or you go to a rock venue, or you go to a singer/songwriter place. And literally there are only two venues that are inclusive, so I don’t know where that leaves the rest of the country, which I would argue is more parochial, right? So I think HEARding Cats, being inclusive, and not necessarily a New Music Circle kind of thing, where maybe that was a certain kind of vibe, they are more trying to be all-inclusive. Which is why we’re really excited to be playing with them.
Yeah, they seem to have a genuine joy about what they do, which seems to be the exception rather than the rule these days. And I’m curious, since you’ve lived all over the world -- why do you think that the U.S. has this problem with being so specialized? Other musicians said that in the U.S. maybe it’s a problem with venues playing music that’s just for dancing, or to drink beer to.
My short take on that is, people are people, and honestly if you look at my schedule this year, I have a lot more U.S. stuff going on than I ever have. I figured out that if you just market it right, that’s the reason we’re talking, if you have something that’s accessible, and something that’s fun, people dig it. Really. The difference is in Europe is that music’s explained in those terms, and the other big difference is that a lot of venues have funding, whether it’s from a government source, or a private source. So the curators are inclined to be more artistically driven, rather than having to think about how many beers they can sell. So I would approach a venue and they’d say, "Ravish, I love what you’re doing, but I need to sell beer." But can you imagine if a local jazz club had funding from the St. Louis Council for the Arts or whatever, and then could take those chances? That’s a huge difference. People are crying so much about public health care, what about public art? (Laughs.) Who’s going to stand for their money going to fund music that they don’t like? (Laughs.)
I was looking at your selected musical influences on your site. That’s a pretty amazing spectrum of artists up there…you’ve got everything from Albert Ayler to Led Zeppelin. Really a vast range of stuff as far as influences.
But you have to! Normally when you ask people, they say, I listen to everything, jazz, blues, classical, rock, R&B…(laughs). But there’s way more to music than those genres. For me, as a musician, I feel like I owe it to myself to keep challenging my ears, and find out what else is out there. Having lived in all these different countries, I was exposed to a lot of different music growing up. So now I have this thirst, like wow, what’s happening in Indonesian jazz? Or what’s the traditional music of Norway like? Or what do people do in Japan, or the Appalachian mountains? Whatever it is, I’m just curious. It’s not like I’m trying to be eclectic for the sake of being eclectic, I just love learning about other cultures and other ideas. And that’s what jazz has always been about -- and I think that spirit has gotten lost. Now, it’s so codified and rigid. That’s why I put that up there. (Laughs.)
But it seems like there’s a movement now among younger jazz musicians like you guys, or people like the Bad Plus, to bust through that rigidity. There’s always going to be purists, but it does seem to be changing.
I would say it’s not changing, but going back to the true calling of jazz, really. One of the things I do a lot is music education workshops with inner-city kids. We talk a lot about, especially in black communities, where jazz comes from, because they have no idea. They don’t know anything but rap and hip-hop. So I explain to them that they just took pots and pans or whatever they could get their hands on, and started playing, and then grabbed European instruments and started playing on them, and that’s how we got the blues, and then we got jazz out of the blues. To me, that defined the quintessential American experience of creativity, and individuality. If anything, to me, the greatest export America’s given to the world is music. Really. Anywhere you go in the world, people are playing some combination of rock and roll or jazz, or a combination of any of that. So when I see someone like the Bad Plus, I think they’re just going back to their roots.
So I wanted to ask you about your recordings.
If you go on the website, and go under audio, you’ll see two files on top. Those are still unreleased, but they represent everything I’m talking about with the electronics. The way we record is the way we play. One of the things I’d stress to your audience is that there are no overdubs on what they are going to hear; all the layers of sound they are hearing, we do that live. The cello player is having all these effects go through his laptop, and he sounds like a one-man orchestra. So he gets four or five lines going, and I do the same with the drums. So what they are going to hear is not some doctored up, heavily produced record. That’s really how we did it -- with one take, in the studio. And really, our goal is to bring improvisation into the electronica world. Oftentimes, that’s a rigid world too, with 4/4 dance music, but why does it have to be so rigid and sterile? It can be crazy world rhythms in it, so that’s one of our goals too, to open up the electronica world. (Laughs.)
Anything you want to talk about in terms of this line-up of Trio Tarana?
Yeah, definitely. I would say that right now, I’m working with an amazing, super-young guy named Greg Heffernan who’s a cellist. He’s really at the forefront as far as how to marry the technology with an improvisational approach. I think that’s really where music has to go, because there’s only so much you can do playing an instrument, and we live in such an age of Myspace and Twitter and Facebook, and how come, when it comes to music, we put all that aside and pretend that we live in this pre-electric age? So for him, he found an amazing way to bridge all of that together. The same with our viola player, Frantz [Loriot]. That’s an important point to note, the person that will be on the gig is subbing for Skye [Steel]. He’s actually from Paris, and is living here temporarily, and brings a whole different European aesthetic to it. Which is for me, important. The jazz thing gets kind of tired, and I am always looking for players who will bring different ideas and different energy to the table.
How does his playing differ from Skye Steel’s playing?
Skye comes from more of a world music background. He studied a lot of Turkish music. So it’s more of a raw, world music kind of tradition. Frantz also grew up with the same kinds of influences as I did with the rock and roll, and he organically blends the electronics with his ideas. To me, he sort of naturally blends those worlds, as opposed to the excesses of 1970s fusion, where you have like some ridiculous long-ass violin solo going through wah-wah pedals.
So no covers of Jean-Luc Ponty, sounds like.
No (laughing). I would stress the world organic, because we all live with technology, we live with improvisation, all of these ideas swirling, and that’s what we are doing. Nothing like Weather Report! It had its time and place, but that’s not what we’re doing. People should get ready to be surprised, get ready to dance, and get ready to go to a familiar-unfamiliar place.
