Saxophone player George Brooks gets ‘home-like feel’ whenever he lands in India, a country he’d first seen precisely 36 years ago. He was in town to perform for a fusion concert laced with patriotic fervour. Dressed in a mustard-coloured kurta, strands of his hair neatly tied into two plaits, under the open skies on a breezy afternoon at The Park, the man has a lot to talk about the land that’s beyond music. You can’t miss the sincerity even as he mouths the predicatable ‘I love the people, the culture’ phrase. Brooks can’t resist talking about the delicious Maharashtrian meal he’s had the day before. “I really like trying out new food every time I’m here,” he says.
The conversation naturally takes a musical turn soon enough, as he talks of his love for ragas, gayakis, gharanas, the gravitational pull between notes in the classical form. His tone acquires a spiritual dimension on the impact it has had on him. “The spiritual side, regardless of the form, takes precedence whenever music progresses in the right direction; you’re connected to people in front of you and around the world. It’s a little sad that the audience for the form here is reducing by the day.”
He was incredibly disturbed to listen to some poor electronic and jazz stuff during his Indian tours. “When you have so much wealth, a Hariprasad Chaurasia, Ravi Shankar for instance, why don’t you celebrate them more?” he asks.
The topic then veers towards his love for the saxophone. He says, “I like the fact that I use my breath and the saxophone has a wide range of expressions, like the human voice. Whenever I play, it feels like like pranayama and meditation. I’m a fan of using the long tunes, like playing ‘sa’ and recognising its various colours over time.” Aspirant saxophonists, he says, should listen to music as much as they play the instrument. “One needs to understand the people who inspire you, what makes their work unique and touches you. You needn’t imitate them that way, but make efforts in a similar direction.”
He makes interesting comparisons between the teacher-student equation in the West and India. “A majority of the students there are still like, you take some information from the teacher and make a move. The lessons are maybe more scheduled. Here, I had to do a lot of household chores (he laughs) as part of the guru-shishya equation,” he laughs. Talking of how students indeed help the teacher many a time, he says, “Sometimes, students help you start afresh. We, musicians, often practice the same thing everytime, like looking at the same crystal from different angles.”
The need for compromise
With a career that boasts of several collaborations with artistes like Zakir Hussain, Vikku Vinayakram (ghatam) to Shankar Mahadevan and a long list of international musicians, he says collaborations will work only when there’s adjustment and compromise. “It’s basically like any other human interaction, of stepping back and listening to another perspective.”
