Zoe’s ‘classy’ duo

Last month’s contribution to improvised art and modern music happened, once again, at the Auditorium at the British School Colombo under the aegis of the British Council. Pianist Zoe Rahman was in the company of her sibling, clarinetist Idris Rahman; their worlds intertwining beyond the impress of familial genes but rather crafted along the lines of a musical ancestry distilled and deriving from the commonalities in modern American, African, European and South Asian forms. To borrow a germane phrase from the urbane Duke Ellington, the evening was persuasively an “Afro Eurasian Eclipse”!

The duo in its present form is new and likely transient, since the Berklee bred Zoe usually leads her own band and is admittedly in the cutting edge of the current ‘new thing’, while Idris Rahman has a vital place in the Afro-beat outfit (Soothsayers) of which he is a part, and they too pursue the path of integrity. But together on this tour of South Asia, the duo was introduced to the audience as a “classy act”.

Indubitably, they both lived up to that expectation. Zoe’s pianism exhibits both delicacy of touch as well as a comprehensive mastery of modern developments in the genre, while Idiris showed that he knows his instrument well with tonality and vigour that was equally in the Jimmy Hamilton groove while portraying the contemporary artistic emphases associated with the likes of Don Byron.

What was particularly interesting was that with the least self-consciousness or maudlin tackiness they were able to work in the essence of their familial Bengali roots and offer their versions and variations of Bengali music, including some songs associated with and recognizably belonging to the revered Rabindranath Tagore!

The question that easily presents itself is “Is this jazz?”

A straightforward response could well be, “What is jazz supposed to be today?” This duo had little in common with the art form that emerged from the African-American milieu of a century ago nor were we treated to any ‘blues licks’ or ‘riffs’ nor references to Tin Pan Alley favourites, although in terms of some aspects of phraseology, attack, response to harmonic and chordal progressions, theirs was a keen awareness of the ‘jazz mainstream’ born of both sides of the Atlantic.

The opening piece harked to the ethos of the Coltrane Quintet of the middle nineteen sixties. Some filigree and scalar densities wrought on the piano provided the fundamentals for the soaring imagination of the clarinetist. He in turn impressively exploited the lower register on the clarinet to create moods and consonances while his sister kept a stream of varying backgrounds.

Suddenly, one heard an almost definite departure into an Ellingtonian tonality, which this reviewer found in common with the memorable “Amad” from the “Far East Suite” of 1966; a beautiful and resonant melodic line with sumptuous rhythmic chords directed by the piano. It was particularly pleasant to be told that this was a composition by the influential Ellington protégé Abdullah Ibrahim (a.k.a. Dollar Brand in the 1960s) from South Africa. A case of ideas travelling the full circle!

Whatever the delights displayed such as those mentioned here, Zoe seemed intent on being a part and parcel of the duo context. One felt that this option proved unnecessarily limiting. Since hers often seemed a role of supporting the soaring departures wrought by her clarinetist, we were not sufficiently privy to her personal piano style. In fact there were no ‘solo’ departures that we could have relished, and which her recordings reveal is well worth an encounter.

This absence also told on the ‘soul’ of the performance; her polite assays being more objective than generative in a sense. One hopes that there will be more that we shall in time hear from this most viable of duos, as experience matures the more feisty and compelling nature of this classy act. If Jimmy Guiffre and Steve Lacy did it in their time in their way, why could not there be another “Bengali” way?