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Terrific jazz, serious fun

PHOTO: BHAGYA PRAKASH K.

FINE CHOICE Most of the pieces they played that evening ranged from being medium to fast in tempo

When I saw him at Olive Beach nearly two weeks ago, I told Sharik Hasan I’d wondered how he’d work out with a digital keyboard instead of a grand piano. He worked out very well, thank you, though in reply to my remark he said “Oh, this is just fun.”

On July 30, at the Alliance Française at the event organised by Seagrams 100 Pipers, this 24-year-old who lives and works in Paris – and when he was robbed of his iPod while waiting for the 1 a.m. bus, the “Noctillion”, composed a piece dedicated to the bus and called by the same name – showed us what he wouldn’t call “just fun”. (Incidentally, he should be at home with the grand piano on this occasion, since he must have played it often when studying at the Bangalore School of Music.) With his laid-back style and the apparently effortless ease with which his fingers fly over the keys, though, he looked as if he was having, in the words of the immortal Dizzy Gillespie, “serious fun”, and I’m sure this quality permeating all good jazz led him to switch to it from classical music when he was first exposed to it in the USA. Supported by the Bombay-based Karl Peters, India’s top electric bassist, and Adrian D’Souza, also from Bombay and with an international bio-data as a drummer, Hasan led us through a baker’s dozen of pieces, both jazz standards and original compositions.

As he tickled the ivories with the nimbleness of an Oscar Peterson, the notes coming off in a melodic torrent, he also displayed the harmonic depth of a McCoy Tyner or a Bill Evans. The last two comparisons are more than fortuitous. One of his compositions played by the trio was written in honour of John Coltrane and called “Trane Like”; and he discovered that Tyner, who worked in Coltrane’s most famous quartet for several years, had also written a piece in honour of his old boss with the same title. And Hasan has been recently studying at Bill Evans Piano Academy in Paris. The evening breezed along, most of the pieces being medium to fast in tempo, but for the second number, the ballad “Stella by Starlight”, which too was embellished most of the time with half-notes to double the pace from the basic beat. Hasan took astonishing solos on all the pieces, occasionally more than one. For instance on “Stella by Starlight”, after one solo he led up to a false ending with a crescendo and then suddenly took off on another solo. Now and then he had solo exchanges with D’Souza, each answering the other in call-and-response, and at least once with Peters too. His solo intros, for instance on “Noctillion” and on his arrangement of the standard “The Song Is You”, often built up the mood using a repeated phrase or riff, which could then be played along with the theme. D’Souza had plenty of room to display his various percussive techniques, using felt head sticks on one passage, closing a piece with soft hand-beaten drumming on another piece, sometimes using brushes, then again switching to using sticks against the wooden rims. He seemed to be hugely enjoying himself – that “serious fun” again – while working hard to keep up a hectic pace. He had quite a few solos, including a couple of solo intros, such as on “All the Things You Are”.

Peters was quieter in comparison, his own solos being more sparse. This was a pity, since after he had the first solo on the opening piece, “Straight, no Chaser”, we might have expected quite a lot more from him. But if one listened carefully one could hear he often improvised independently of Hasan instead of merely accompanying his piano solos. On one occasion, though, he seems to have missed a cue, because Hasan, referring to “Trane Like”, said “Karl missed the train”. But on the whole, Hasan’s evident dominance also meant that many of the pieces didn’t have enough variety to allow them to develop long enough. After the promise of “Straight, no Chaser” and “Stella by Starlight” at the opening, this was perhaps something of a let-down, but if the concert wasn’t perfect, it certainly was terrific.

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