F2K Ep. 33 - Saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa

Fun 2 Know Podcast

On today's show, composer, alto saxophonist and the new Director of Jazz at Princeton University, Rudresh Mahanthappa. Rudresh Mahanthappa came out of Boulder Colorado, was educated by Berklee College of Music and DePaul, and received national attention not long after moving to New York in 1998 where he soon beginning collaborating with the then up-and-coming, now major jazz force, pianist Vijay Iyer. Besides making a series of major statements with Iyer, Mahanthappa has collaborated with guitarist Rez Abbasi and trumpeter Amir ElSaffar for some of the freshest and most-ground-breaking jazz releases of the last decade. He's won the yearly Downbeat Poll multiple times, has had a string of recordings under his own name for Innova, Pi Recordings and the Clean Feed label.and BIRD CALLS, honoring the work of Charlie Parker is his latest on the ACT Music label. Rudresh has reached out to the Princeton community, checking in with WPRB in Princeton, where DJs have been playing his music for over a decade. He dropped in to WPRB's studios late in his first semester teaching there, and was very warm and open, excitingly talking about his plans for the Princeton Jazz program but he also talks about learning his craft in primary school, taking the alto saxophone into the future, working with the elusive Bunky Green, losing a sax in Hurricane Sandy and what's next in his recording and performing career. Artists like Rudressh and Vijay Iyer and their many collaborators, as well as guitarist Mary Halvorson, pianist Matthew Shipp, bassist William Parker, flutist Nicole Mitchell, and still-vital elder statesmen like drummer Jack DeJohnette, composer Henry Threadgill and countless others are what make the weekly jazz show I program at WPRB-Princeton seem to endlessly rejuvenate, despite uninformed naysayers repeating that “jazz is dead” nonsense.