Charu Suri and Joe Lastie bring the ‘Spirit of New Orleans Jazz’ to India
- Art Featured Lifestyle
Zara Flavia Dmello
- 11 minutes read
“I usually hate coming to these things alone,” I confide to Charu Suri next to the kiosk where she hands out signed posters of her album “Rags & Ragas”— “But somehow I’m having so much fun here!”. “That’s just the spirit of jazz!” she beams, “We come together as strangers, and leave as one big family.”
Her words, so earnestly spoken, were a fitting prelude to the evening’s grand finale when the audience sprung off their seats and danced around to the ever-infectious “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In”. Stripped of its stage lights and baroque grandeur, the Royal Opera House theatre in these final moments of the concert last Friday, really did compare uncannily to one of my annual family Christmas parties. Infused with the same cozy, communal soul of such a gathering, I imagine if I’d photoshopped everyone—pianists, singers, jivers, and all— on to a background of my own living room on a chilly December evening, that they’d fit right in.
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Charu Suri herself had a warmth and tenderness with which she spoke to her audience. Though she was technically the star of the night, she happily shared her spotlight with her sister, Sharmi who brought in tow, the spice to Charu’s sugar. Clad in white, sequins and feathers with the likes of a 1920’s swing performer, Sharmi’s voice was rich, commanding and generous. Accompanying them, straight from the heartland, was Joe Lastie, a sensational drummer and stalwart of the Preservation Hall scene in New Orleans.
The opera house has been known to bring in talents like these right to Mumbai’s doorstep and their collaboration with Avid Learning and Furtados for the ‘Spirit of New Orleans Jazz’ concert was no different. I find it important to underscore the role of these specified ‘talents’ here. There are a number of smoky bars and dimly lit speakeasies in Mumbai that showcase acts from the city itself, replicating the phenomenal compositions of jazz’s most renown artists. Good jazz music is not too hard to come by here.
So what is special about this show? Well, it wasn’t just the music, but the musicians, specifically Lastie and Suri, who made it something worth looking towards. In their exploration of the jazz form, both performers simultaneously chartered a journey through their own distinct personal histories. These histories have informed their encounters with jazz and how they choose to mould the genre’s conventions. As a result, Lastie and Suri represent strikingly contrasting relationships with jazz, each contributing their own imagination of what it has been and can become.
With Joe Lastie, I suddenly became cognisant of this idea when Suri announced that she would be playing “Basin Street Blues”, and Lastie exclaimed, “Hey! That’s where I live!’. Having grown up in New Orleans, a city so synonymous with jazz that its very streets have inspired countless songs, Lastie’s connection to the music is almost autobiographical, as it would be with any New Orleanian.
Watching him clamour and holler with excitement during climactic moments in these songs intrinsically referential of a city he so clearly adores, it is hard to tell where the music ends and his real life begins. Lastie’s early immersion in the traditional style of jazz in a space that lives and breathes this music, imbues his playing with an intimacy, nostalgia and unbridled joy almost impossible to find in non native jazz artists.
In contrast, Charu Suri’s journey into jazz was one of invigorating discovery. As a classically trained pianist from India, she only recently stumbled upon jazz during a visit to Preservation Hall in New Orleans when she felt inexplicably drawn to explore the style. Unlike Lastie’s deeply ingrained cultural connection, Charu approaches jazz as a canvas for blending her classical Indian roots with new influences.
Her ‘raga jazz’ style is a manifestation of such a fusion, where she intertwines the melodic and rhythmic traditions of Indian raags and taals, with the harmonic interlay of jazz. She has been recognised greatly for this by the global music industry and even made history as the first Indian jazz artist to perform four times at Carnegie Hall. Her use of a cross-cultural blend has allowed her to create pieces of multimedia artwork, mixing existing elements to craft something entirely new, or, as Suri put it, “its own different world”.
This of course, is not to say that her music is not personal. How could it not be? As she rightly pointed out when asked about her composing process, “Bill Evans said, “jazz is a feeling” and for me that emotional connection is the core of any piece.” When she played “Waltz for my Father” and “Verona Waltz”, two songs dedicated to her late father, the latter of which won her Best Jazz Song in North America last year, the entire theatre went silent. It was a fresh sound, none of us had ever heard before, and yet endearingly relaxed and self-composed. There was an undeniably emotional place from which these pieces were born.
Fusion here, wasn’t for fusion’s sake, but for the hope to arrive at the sound of her own feelings, in this case, perhaps grief, though not always in its conventional form. You could sense that it was purposeful— the components she had scrounged for from both genres like seashells in the sand— and her use of neither felt gimmicky. These components were not always the archetypal sounds from either jazz or Indian classical, which is to say that only if you research well and listen close can you hear the raga or jazz in her ‘raga jazz’. It is because of this, its innate subtlety, that her music cannot be for everybody.
Almost acknowledging this, Suri also did deliver classic sing-along-ables to keep her audience entertained and bopping along, a respectable endeavour in its own right and equally important as emotional depth in the jazz performance space. Her stirring ‘raga jazz’ pieces were sandwiched between these popular hits, namely Pops’. When the piano sounded “When You’re Smiling,” the elderly gentleman in the row before me who had been the first one on his feet since the start of the concert, put his hand out to his wife in the seat next to him and the two of them twirled around by the side of the stage.
It was inspired by the flamboyant, boisterous spirit of this very man, that the rest of the crowd joined the song and dance by the end. It was hard not to wonder, with the evening’s culmination into spontaneous camaraderie, if this is the spirit that jazz can evoke in little old Bombay, what it must be like in the right in the thick of its birthplace. “Where are you going?” Lastie had sung the stylised Dixieland expression and then turned his left ear towards us expectantly waiting for an answer. “Down To New Orleans” very, very soon, is the hope!
