This is why this pioneering band is among this year's festival highlights in Norway
Just how legendary are Shakti and John McLaughlin? How fierce can improvisational music get? And why should you prioritize the opening concert at the Kongsberg Jazz Festival high in your festival budget this year?
We found some knowledgeable and skilled Norwegian musicians to shed light on the legendary interaction between the Indian group and the English musician, and why the meeting between a Western jazz guitarist and South Asian musical traditions hits so hard.
For now you have the chance to see and hear this ground-breaking constellation with your own eyes and ears as they play a exclusive Scandinavia concert at the Kongsberg Jazz Festival along with tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain. This takes place in Kongsberg Musikkteater on the opening day, 5 July.
Buy tickets here // See festival programme
Oddrun Lilja: Sitar master couped the cultural school training
- This music took me to bed when I discovered it as a 19-year-old, says guitarist Oddrun Lilja Jonsdottir (31).
She received The #huninvester award during the Kongsberg Jazz Festival last year, has released two albums as LILJA and performs with extended band as LILJA Extended on Energimølla on Thursday during the festival, with the new album "Mirage" in the gig bag.
- For me, the fascination with Indian music and raga began with Shakti, she explains.
- When you are 19 years old, you have a very open mind. One can be very strongly affected by music. And Shakti hit me right in the heart in a way that is hard to explain.
Signed up for a sitar course
The intense teenage encounter with Shakti and South Asian classical music prompted Oddrun, who grew up in Grorud, to sign up for sitar courses at the cultural school in Greenland.
- I stood in line for quite a while, and finally got a seat. Two days before the course was to start, I attended a workshop with Ashraf Sharif Kahn at the Academy of Music. I mentioned to him that I was soon to have my very first sitar lesson. Then he looked at me skeptically and mumbled something like "hm, well, okay?". Then he said: "No, you meet me here on Sunday". This is how the world's best sitar player took me under his wing, she says with a laugh.
Music as one Highway to God
It must be said to have given the musician's career a certain boost. More than ten years later, Oddrun Lilja is a respected and well-travelled musician. Her passport has been stamped in and out of India several times, and she has performed at major raga festivals with her electric guitar. The years as the sitar hero's protégé have given her many opportunities as a musician, but also fierce challenges.
- If you are going to play a raga concert in India, it is seen as a very spiritual matter. People expect the music and the concert to be one Highway to God. It is an extreme art to be able to create that space and that journey for the audience. It also requires a virtuosity, something I admire in Shakti and McLaughlin's guitar playing.
- It's like a language. Each raga is a language, it is not enough to just know the scale and play the notes. You have to be able to maneuver in the language and use it to tell a story that should have dynamics and structure, and that maintains the tension over a long period of time.
Had to make a choice
But there was no full-time existence as a raga musician for a musically searching guitarist from Grorud.
- Eventually I had to make a personal choice. I could choose to dedicate the rest of my life to this music if I were to take this to new levels. But I also have other colors inside me that I would like to bring out in my music. So I got to a point where I thought: I bring the depth and the long lines from the ragas and the Indian music, but I also need to make music based on other impulses.
Buy tickets for Shakti here // Buy tickets for LILJA Extended here
Hedvig Mollestad: Control and explosion hand in hand
- With Shakti, John McLaughlin really managed to redefine what jazz and guitar could be. They set a standard that no one has come close to matching, says another leading Norwegian guitarist, Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen (41).
There may not be any intrusive direct traces of Indian music tradition in the otherwise genre-crossing power trio format of the Hedvig Mollestad Trio, but John McLaughlin ranks high on Hedvig's list of guitar heroes.
- For me, it was extremely groundbreaking to hear what McLaughlin did with the Mahavishnu Orchestra. I think it was fantastic and wild, she explains.
- This is music that has almost everything. Cool riffs, weird riffs, complicated stuff that just sounds fat and shaky, absolutely fantastic guitar sound, lovely distortion and with a ring modulator here and there, tight directed parts, loose and wild duo parts. Control and explosion hand in hand.
Curiosity across genres and countries
Hedvig Mollestad says that she has gradually learned to appreciate more the breadth of McLaughlin's music and talent.
- An important inspiration for me is McLaughlin's deep understanding of jazz, combined with a seemingly unlimited curiosity for the guitar as an instrument and source of music, across genres and countries. Then he may have gradually moved in a direction where I have not been so interested in terms of sound and style. But his humble attitude towards music and other musicians, students and people and the world in general seems completely genuine and is something to look up to.
Around the same time John McLaughlin co-founded Shakti with violinist L. Shankar and tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain in the mid-1970s, he released the Mahavishnu album 'Visions of the Emerald Beyond'. It is Hedvig Mollestad's favorite in the McLaughlin catalogue.
- It's an album that has everything, and one of the very few records that I still get a lot out of. It grabs me and engages me on a childlike level, it makes me happy and giddy. Imagine that such cool and cool and fun things have been made on the guitar!
The fascination with the album extends so far that she has incorporated parts of it when she is out playing with her trio.
- We often play the last track "On The Way Home To Earth" over the system when we leave the stage. What happens between McLaughlin and drummer Narada Michael Walden here is truly one of the greatest musical highlights I can imagine.
High pregnancy McLaughlin heater
In 2014, the Hedvig Mollestad Trio warmed up for McLaughlin, in the Royal Festival Hall itself during the London Jazz Festival.
- I was six months pregnant, and the week before the gig I was admitted to Ullevål hospital and underwent emergency surgery for appendicitis. The interview afterwards showed that I had no intention of dropping the London trip under any circumstances.
Once in London, it was also time for a heroic meeting with McLaughlin.
- He was wearing a knee-high pink V-neck sweater and even asked to touch my stomach. He thought it was going to be a girl. And he was right about that!
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Morten Halle: Hybrid music that becomes something more
- Shakti is ects hybrid music, true fusion. It is not two musical traditions that just meet, it is something much more. There are musicians who seek to learn each other's tradition and fuse this together into unique music. When John McLaughlin and Shakti did this in the early 1970s it was very unique, explains Morten Halle (65).
He is a saxophone veteran from Oslo's jazz and fusion milieu, but also a central figure in introducing the students at the Academy of Music to Indian musical traditions and instruments. Here, a number of Indian musicians have been lecturers and guest teachers, both in shorter classes and workshops, but also as a separate subject under the leadership of sarod player Sudeshna Bhattacharya. It was in such a workshop that Oddrun Lilja was "discovered" by Ashraf Sharif Kahn.
- There are countless examples of fusion and cultural mixing where the musicians sit and do their own thing next to or on top of each other. Here are the unique Indian musicians I have met. They are keen to convey their tradition in a generous way for Western musicians. They teach you a small slice of a great heavy tradition, which really takes a lifetime to master. They give you an insight and facilitate a musical meeting point where you can play together, explains associate professor Halle.
This mindset characterizes Shakti in particular. John McLaughlin represents a time difference here, says Morten Halle.
- John McLaughlin went in depth and really learned the traditions, both the South Indian and the North Indian, which are expressed in Shakti's music. This is a new level after Mahavishnu Orchestra. Remember that McLaughlin came from a British blues and rock background when he started Mahavishnu. This was an early example of fusion that a more traditional and acoustically oriented jazz audience was not quite ready to embrace. The Shakti project, which was more acoustic, helped give McLaughlin a wider impact in the jazz community. The successful fusion opened up Indian music to a larger Western audience, explains Morten Halle.
The saxophonist and musicologist also points out another important factor in the successful hybrid of Indian traditional music and jazz that Shakti is an exponent of.
- What comes across as free and energetic, and which lasts 18 minutes, hits so well because there is an underlying plan and structure behind the chaos. Therefore, we feel that the music gains momentum and logic over time. This also characterizes the best jazz improvisations, from Coltrane onwards. Here, there are many music students who have had a-ha experiences, and who have experienced that in Indian traditional music there are direct, tangible tools to become better improvisational musicians. That planning is not easy to hear for an untrained Western ear, but it is absolutely central, explains Morten Halle.
Buy tickets here // See festival programme
Buy tickets here // See festival programme
Ten things you need to know:
Shakti, John McLaughlin and the connecting lines between jazz and traditional Indian music are an exciting part of music history. Here are some facts and connections that are worth taking with you:
- Shakti was founded in 1974. The album debut came in 1976, a concert recording from Long Island, New York in 1975.
- "Shakti" is Sanskrit and can be simply translated as "power" or "energy". It is a catchphrase that includes a large part of the world and life, and can refer, among other things, to the creative energy that flows through the band's music.
- The band was one of the first in the jazz field to combine elements of Indian classical music with jazz, which created a unique fusion sound long before "world music" had become a term.
- Shakti combines guitar and violin with traditional Indian instruments such as tabla, mridangam and ghatam.
- John McLaughlin had a spiritual quest that led him to Indian philosophy and meditation. He became a follower of the Indian spiritual teacher Sri Chinmoy and even changed his name to "Mahavishnu", which gave the name to his band Mahavishnu Orchestra which debuted on album in 1971. This was McLaughlin's first major project in which he explored and integrated Indian music into his own composition and performance.
- McLaughlin played an important role in Miles Davis' electric jazz period and appeared on several of his albums, including "In a Silent Way" and "Bitches Brew". This in turn laid the foundation for his experimental, improvisational and musical openness.
- Both Indian classical music and jazz place great emphasis on improvisation. In South Asian music, the terms "Raga" (melodic structure) and "Tala" (rhythmic structure) are used. A shared passion for spontaneity and creative expression has helped to create a natural bond with jazz.
- Ragas can be described as rich and varied scales, with different sentiments ("rasa") and specific rules for the order of the notes. Such scales bear similarities to jazz modes and have inspired Western musicians to experiment with new melodic and harmonic concepts.
- Indian music is rhythmically intricate and complex, and the system of talas in practice functions as rhythmic cycles. This has captivated and inspired jazz musicians, who are often interested in exploring such rhythmic patterns.
- The Beatles' well-documented fascination with India, sitars and Ravi Shankar opened Western eyes and ears to Indian traditional music. Within jazz, the married couple John and Alice Coltrane are perhaps just as important as sources of inspiration within a direction that can be called spiritual jazz.
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Text: Sven Ove Bakke
