Multiplicity (Harrison, Shobhakar, Takeishi) perform in Greenfield

by Glenn Siegel

It seems entirely appropriate that the recording by Multiplicity, the project of Joel Harrison and Anupam Shobhakar, is on a label called Whirlwind. Both of them, plus Satoshi Takeishi, piled in a car and made the trip from New York to Greenfield, Massachusetts to perform the third concert in Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares’ fourth season on Sunday, November 29. The trio not only braved the Thanksgiving traffic (a three-and-a-half hour trip turned into a five hour grind), but after the concert the group turned around and made the return trip to the Big Apple.

Harrison had to rehearse his 18-piece ensemble, which premiered two of his compositions at Roulette on December 1, Shobhakar was leaving early Tuesday for India and Takeishi had to deal with his car in the shop. Such is the life of working musicians.

The payoff for the band’s endured hardship was an appreciative audience that filled the Arts Block with love and rapt attention during a wonderful 75-minute performance.

I imagine most concertgoers were seeing and hearing the sarod for the first time. A large and beautiful, four-string fretless lute, the instrument was in a setting very different from the Hindustani classical music tradition for which it was originally intended. The 36 year-old Shobhakar, raised on both intense classical Indian studies and Megadeth, seemed equally at home performing original tunes based on raga cycles, and American blues. One of the evening’s highlights was a performance of “Devil Mountain Blues” (a piece that emerged from their initial musical encounter and cemented their musical friendship.) Harrison played it, and Willie Dixon’s “Spoonful”, on steel-bodied national guitar, joking (?) that his guitar and the sarod (which has a metal fingerboard) were distant cousins. Shobhakar’s slide technique (called meend) and the sound of Harrison’s slides did, in fact, feel like a deep conversation between strangely familiar strangers.

Shobhakar talks of years of doing music exercises, an intense training process known as “tayarri”, literally ‘technically great’. But its real meaning is ‘to be ready’, putting in the work so your fingers, your mind and your soul are ready when creativity strikes.

Percussionist Satoshi Takeishi, who has obviously undergone an intense training process of his own, filled in for Dan Weiss, who is featured on Multiplicity’s recording, “Leave the Door Open”. On April 2, Takeishi sat in for Samir Chatterjee in Ned Rothenberg’s “Inner Diaspora” ensemble at the UMass Magic Triangle Series. On both occasions, Takeishi showed how ready he was. Playing frame drum and other hand percussion, snare, and a varied assortment of cymbals and bells, Takeishi provided an evening’s worth of texture, color and drive. For him to be able to nail the complicated rhythms of the more overt Indian pieces is a testament to the massive technique he has at his disposal. In fact, I marveled at that very phenomenon when Dan Weiss sat in for Nasheet Waits for the first time in Amir ElSaffar’s Two Rivers Ensemble at the September Jazz Shares offering.

How do they do it? Fit in so seamlessly? Give the music just what it needs? They make it look easy; it’s anything but. It’s the result of years of rigorous study and years of demanding performing experience. And, we are the beneficiaries.