CHARM

Chronique

Indian sitar music-meets-jazz fusion on the debut album from the genre-bending quartet Naya Baaz, 2023's Charm. While the sitar has been used in jazz since the 1950s and took on a deeper significance in the '60s as masters like Ravi Shankar influenced the work of artists like John Coltrane and Yusef Lateef, the marriage of Indian classical and modern creative jazz feels absolutely fresh here. A collaboration between jazz guitarist Rez Abbasi and sitar player Josh Feinberg, Naya Baaz (the Hindi term for "new falcon") also features the talents of five-string cellist Jennifer Vincent and drummer Satoshi Takeishi. One the most obvious touchstones for the East-meets-West aesthetic at play in Naya Baaz's sound is guitarist and Mahavishnu Orchestra founder John McLaughlin's groundbreaking 1970's band Shakti, a similarly cross-pollinated collaboration that paired the fusion guitar innovator with Indian virtuoso's like tablaist Zakir Hussain and mridangam player Vikku Vinayakram. With Naya Baaz, Abbasi and Feinberg build upon that legacy, pushing their respective styles further to the edges while also finding ever more common ground. However, where Shakti always felt more like a chance for McLaughlin to explore Indian classical music, Abbasi and Feinberg's work is an almost perfect amalgam of genres. Much of this is due to the fact that each of the musicians in Naya Baaz has deep roots in jazz as well as various multi-cultural music traditions. They bring all of that experience to bear on Charm, crafting a sound that feels utterly organic; it's a fluid blend of Indian classical and jazz that's distinctive in its own right. There are tracks like "Bekhayal (Without a Thought)," with its spiraling free-bop melody that sounds amazingly as if Ravi Shankar had joined Miles Davis' late-'60s quintet. There's also the wryly titled "Chick's Magnet," whose title and moody, minor-key chromaticism is a clear nod to keyboardist Chick Corea's own globally minded fusion jazz. Elsewhere, they conjure a rustic psychedelia as on the bluesy, Taj Mahal-esque title track and "Reaching," where Vincent and Takeishi lay down a thick, Led Zeppelin-style power-chord groove over which Feinberg and Abbasi take turns dancing in lyrically dissonant rapture. There's a textural quality to much of Charm, especially on the three short introductions that break up the album, where Feinberg's sitar is the shimmering rainbow horizon against Abbasi's dark guitar moon.

© Matt Collar /TiVo