He wants to shut your rational mind down

One of India's greatest jazz pianists Madhav Chari tells Aditi Sharma why he chose music over math, and how he hopes to bring a 45-minute performance that collaborates jazz and martial arts to Mumbai soon

It is said that jazz pianist Madhav Chari is the kind of guy who can simply pick up the phone and call New York-based jazz great Wynton Marsalis. That's perhaps the perk of having hung out with Marsalis in their formative years.

He was introduced to this genre of music at an early age thanks to his father's love for jazz. He remembers Louis Banks performing a solo piano concert in his home, when he was just six. So, when it was time to choose between a safe career in maths and his passion for music, he knew where he was going.

What is Trinethra, the jazz and martial arts collaboration all about?
Trinethra started off as a joint performance piece between my martial arts collaborator, George Kurien, and me. The performance brings together the mythologies of Asia and martial arts and the mythologies of jazz music.

But they are very different art forms...u00a0
Ah, but are they different? What I also want to do in this performance is to shut your rational mind down. So, I might be doing something which is very slow, and the martial artist might be doing something very fast. And the standard thing, which I get very bored with in movies, is that there is a desperate conversion between sound and visual. I don't want the visuals and audio to be a prop for each other. We had to enter each other's worlds.
I had to do some Tai Chi exercises and George had to listen to jazz music. At the end of the 45-minute performance you feel like you've been through a two-hour performance.

Your father used to round up kids in the Kolkota colony you grew up in, take them home to listen to Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman. Is that true?
Not just children, if there were piano players visiting Kolkota, they would come home. In fact, Louis Banks must have forgotten this but one of the rare instances when he gave a solo piano concert for a very serious audience, was in our home. It wasn't just a house concert because my dad was a patron, there were a whole bunch of people who used to organise such events. And I was six years old and I saw Louis Banks play solo piano for two hours. You would never see that in the 70s.

Your father is learning the trumpet and has ambitions of performing one day. Can we look forward to a performance with him?
He was learning the trumpet in the 70s as well, but now he has gone deeper into the formalism of it. I don't see us performing together because he's an amateur and I'm a professional.

What would you prefer performing at a jazz concert where the audience knows their music or at a nightclub venue that helps you reach out to a newer audience?
It depends on my mood. The tragedy in India is that across the board, even with Hindustani or Carnatic music, the number of serious listeners has dwindled in the last 20 years. There is some kind of revival effort by young musicians. But barring Chennai, which has this music season, the rest of India is very, very music un-friendly.

Everybody wants entertainment but the world doesn't run on entertainment. I don't have a problem with entertainers but that's not where I want to be. I want to use music as a tool that will transform your consciousness. The way John Coltrane did.

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