E-Mail This Article to a Friend To the East and back Journeys with Phil Scarff and Natraj BY JON GARELICK

Although he was already on a career path as an electrical engineer, Phil Scarff moved to Boston in the late ’70s for the reason a lot of people do: "I was looking for a place where I could really play music, where there was a lot going on musically." Boston appealed not only for the quantity of its musical activity but also for the variety. A saxophonist, Scarff began a long course of study with Jerry Bergonzi, a guiding light to saxophonists in the Boston area as well as a veteran bandleader and sideman for, among others, Dave Brubeck. Bergonzi, it turned out, played not only saxophone but bass and drums fluently. "Gerry’s an amazing player all around," says Scarff, "but one of the things he’s amazing at is his application of rhythm to improvising."

Although a visionary like Sonny Rollins is known for creating daunting extended improvisations from a series of rhythmic motifs, giving each solo a sense of organic development as well as a sure guide to the listener’s ear through the harmonic maze of bebop, rhythmic motivic development is the last rather than the first thing most musicians learn about improvising jazz. Scarff, like most student jazz musicians, had learned how to improvise by studying chords, by creating melodies over various harmonic progressions.

"Gerry would say, ‘Let’s compose a rhythm and improvise off that.’ " In other words: create melodies based on rhythmic patterns rather than chord patterns. "At one point, Gerry said to me, ‘You know, I think you should study with a drummer.’ " So Scarff went off to Bob Gullotti, drummer with the Fringe and a well-respected teacher. Gullotti’s approach, it turned out, was just as holistic as Bergonzi’s. "He gave me this standard drum-exercise book — I think it was a snare-drum book — and said, ‘One of the things you have to do is play this book.’ I had to play all the exercises in the book on my horn, improvising melodies." With Gullotti, Scarff studied every conceivable approach to time and note placement within the rhythm: "How to play right on the time, right after the time, how to adjust your time feel. We worked a lot with polyrhythms. And then he also kicked my butt making me learn tunes in different keys."

At around this time, Scarff was also getting interested in West African music and working with the Boston-based Agbekor Drum and Dance Society and playing with the group Antigravity, whose leader, Warren Senders, was combining jazz with elements of East Indian music. Scarff didn’t know much about Indian music — he studied Senders’s pieces by rote, as it were. It was after a particularly inspiring concert Senders had organized with the bamboo flutist Steve Gorn that Scarff decided he had to immerse himself in Indian music. He studied here and then began making trips to India, where he studied with players of the double-reed shehnai, because it’s the instrument most closely related to the soprano saxophone, the soprano being the most sensible of his reeds for playing Indian music. Aside from the instrument’s musical flexibility, which is suitable for complex ornamentation, Scarff points out that "Indian artists sit cross-legged on the floor, and if you tried to do that with a tenor, you’d be in trouble." Over time, his visits to India would become almost annual.

In 1987, Scarff began working with Jerry Leake, a percussionist who’d also been studying Indian tabla and West African percussion. Joining forces with bassist Mike Rivard (Either/Orchestra and later Club d’Elf), they formed the core of Natraj, who would eventually become a quintet with the addition of violinist Mat Maneri and a variety of second percussionists. Since then, the band have recorded three albums and are regulars on the Regattabar schedule. With Maneri now living in New York full-time, they often work with guest artists whom Scarff has hooked up with in his trips to India. At the Regattabar this Wednesday, they’ll be joined by Chitravina N. Ravikiran, who’s named for the stringed instrument he plays, plucking the strings and stopping them with a plastic slide. Ravikiran performed with Natraj on their tour of India this past January.

What’s most impressive about Natraj is their ability to avoid gimmicky pastiche and create an integrated musical world, with Rivard’s muscular acoustic bass and the drums of Bertram Lehman underlining the delicate textures woven by Scarff and Leake. Although each piece has its own "fingerprint," as Scarff likes to say, the various subgenres of North and South Indian music and those deathless West African grooves are stamped with the band’s own identity. "My initial approach was not to blend but to study Indian music and learn it and perform it," says Scarff. "Then over time, I got the idea that I wanted to mix them." He initially planned to study Indian music for about a year — but that year never ended.

Natraj, with special guest Chitravina N. Ravikiran, play the Regattabar, in the Charles Hotel, 1 Bennett Street in Harvard Square, this Wednesday, April 21; call (617) 876-7777.