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Remember Shakti?
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John McLaughlin’s band Remember Shakti is his latest vehicle for exploring the intersection of jazz and Indian classical music, two forms that embrace improvisation and mastery. Both elements were at the fore during the quartet’s appearance at Sanders Theatre last Friday. In "Ma No Pa," the group took off like beboppers, opening and closing with a fiery head and playing round-robin solos until they seemed to have wrung every bit of sweat and fire from the tune’s blazing, polyrhythmic theme. In fact, most of the night was devoted to the thunderous interplay of master percussionists Zakir Hussain and Vinayakram Selvaganesh on tabla, ghatam, and other traditional Indian instruments, an interplay offset by fast, slashing statements from McLaughlin’s electric guitar and Upalappu Shrinivas’s electric mandolin. But listeners who remember Shakti, the pioneering world-music outfit McLaughlin formed in 1975 after disbanding his Mahavishnu Orchestra, couldn’t help noticing a lack of melodic development in the Sanders performance. The original Shakti — a name that means "creative intelligence, beauty, and power" — thrived on more than rhythmic intensity and instrumental flash. McLaughlin and Shakti violinist Lakshminarayana Shankar engaged in long, exploratory ballets of melody, entangling their instruments through a series of daring, intertwined lines that explored the soaring, microtonal delights of Southern Indian classical music to the fullest. On Friday, the melodies seemed more a means of sparring than spooning. They were usually restricted to short passages that McLaughlin and Shrinivas exchanged in what appeared to be a series of good-natured cutting contests, save for the impressive stretches of unison playing that brought the concert to peaks of breathless intensity. Although Shrinivas is roughly half McLaughlin’s age, he seemed the veteran guitar virtuoso’s equal in speed, dynamics, tone, and imagination. By sliding his fingers along the strings, he was able to make his instrument wail with the voice-like fluidity of the sarod. McLaughlin seemed tame by contrast. It’s his bold precision on acoustic guitar and the soulful gutty richness he has traditionally produced through the fat, round tones of a hollow-body electric or by employing a distorted amplifier that have helped make him a giant of the instrument. At Sanders, he chose to use a synthesizer to transform his strings into an angelic choir in the Shakti set piece "Maya," and to trail his notes with bell-like harmonics elsewhere. The inflexible digital generation of those tones robbed him of a degree of expression, thus occasionally rendering the music — and McLaughlin — generic to those familiar with such effects. With melodies and McLaughlin too often on the back burner and the rhythms at full boil, this concert seemed like a passing of Shakti’s torch to its other original member, Hussain.
BY TED DROZDOWSKI
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