Craving a taste of world music? The Rudresh Mahanthappa Quartet will hit the spot next Wednesday, January 23rd at Brooklyn Public Library. Mahathappa (Ru-dresh Ma-hahn-tha-pa) is an alto saxophonist and composer born in Italy to Indian parents and raised in Colorado. His music celebrates his Indian-American heritage with the hybridization of progressive jazz and South Indian classical music, forming award-winning melodies complemented by pianist Craig Taborn, bassist François Moutin, and drummer Dan Weiss.
Manhathappa has received critical acclaim since the release of his first album, Kinsmen, in 2008, including inclusion on New York Times and NPR’s yearly best-of lists. A 2009 New Yorker article described the musician’s work as the rare genre fusion that achieves synthesis to the extent that curiosity reverberates through the music world. The Chicago Tribune echoed similar praise in 2010: “To observe that Mahanthappa fused the incantatory phrase-making and exotic scales of Indian music with the free-wheeling improvisational spirit of American jazz would be an understatement. He's so thoroughly immersed in both worlds that he conjured up a startlingly original merger of the two.”
Join us for the FREE performance on Wednesday, January 23rd at Central Library's Dweck Center at 7pm.
