Jazz, in a sense, is a back and forth with the world, says Auroville-based jazz musician Dhani Muniz, who has come out with a debut jazz album featuring leading artists who have performed widely on music circuits across the U.S. and Europe besides India.
A guitarist, singer, writer and composer born in Albany, New York, and now settled in the universal township where he covers the art scene for an in-house journal, Muniz’s ‘Chimu Fiesta’ has been billed as an album ‘bred out of dissatisfaction and a healthy dose of anger’.
Chimu is a reference to a pre-Incan civilisation now famed for, among other things, the intrinsic violence of their culture. And, the music is a signifier of a certain type of creative violence, one that is most often palpable in the early stages of things — abstract art, modern classical music, rock n’ roll, Delta blues, jazz, and basically all human civilisation.
“Jazz is a give and take with the world”, he says. “Why are so many current jazz musicians so interested not only in hip-hop culture, but in the culture of Africa, of this idea of returning to something more natural, more holistic? It’s a reaction to what they feel in the world”.
The debut album was a product of his collaborative music project “Suite; The Expatriate” and featured a quintet of composer-musicians Jules Arindam, a city-born graduate of the Los Angeles Music Academy on bass, pianist-composer Aman Mahajan, Suresh Bascara, a French-Indian percussionist from Auroville, and Dutch-born Maarten Visser on tenor and soprano saxophone.
Last week, Muniz, accompanied by Aman and Suresh, introduced ‘Tusker’, the opening piece of the album, at a show in the city. The six-piece instrumental set also features ‘In Orange Fair’, ‘Danger, No Shoulder’, ‘Somewhere in FM’, ‘Naima’ and ‘Ash Wednesday’.
For someone who has been performing since the age of 13, and dabbling in a variety of genres such as blues, pop, folk, metal, jazz and electronic genres, he finds it “a bit strange to think that I’m 24 now to be honest, because in many ways I’m very much the same person who played on this album when I was 21! ... which, in today’s terms, is a little young to make a jazz album, but 60 years ago was normal at least in terms of taste, if not necessarily ideas”.
“It (album) came about very slowly... the oldest composition goes back to when I was 16! But the tunes themselves were written quickly; it was finding musicians that was the challenge! Nobody seemed to be able or willing to play this music, which I found strange, because music is meant to give arguably much more freedom to an individual than a standard from the traditional jazz repertoire.”
Muniz’s influences ranged across The Beatles, Syd Barrett-era Floyd, Australian rock from the 80s, The Police and Sting, and later Led Zeppelin, an old tape of Old & In The Way, a bluegrass band headed by Jerry Garcia that symbolised the string-based music and country soundscape of the 1970s, Albert King and Hubert Sumlin and The Allman Brothers.
In the summer of 2011, he was learning the solos from ‘At Fillmore East’- and The Grateful Dead, who he credits for his getting into jazz. “Their music was the first he’d heard of string-band arrangement techniques being used in a band with drums... it was like discovering a new continent.”
On the jazz scene here, he says: “It’s an odd thing about the culture around jazz, because it actually doesn’t exist. Jazz always existed, it’s just a music of facilitation — different sounds can facilitate different things. Set anything, any scene, to improvised music and even if it’s the same song, the music will change completely depending on what’s given as ‘input’.
