Jazz, it’s my music, let’s play” is emblazoned across the front of pianist Eli Yamin’s T-shirt. It reflects the ethos of the Eli Yamin Quartet, which believes in taking the music to the people as well as making music about the people. The band, in town as part of a cross-cultural venture called Jazz Stories of India and America, are crusaders for making jazz accessible to people. As part of this effort, the quartet’s experiment in Bengal was to combine Rabindrasangeet with the great American form.

With Yamin on piano, Todd Williams on clarinet and saxophone, Stefan Schatz on drums and Ari Roland on upright bass, the performance on Sunday at the Taj Bengal (picture above by Bishwarup Dutta) offered skillful renditions of songs including the swing standards of Duke Ellington, George Gershwin’s classic compositions and the Charlie Parker songbook. But the highlight of the evening was the quartet’s experimental reworkings of Tagore favourites like Ekla chalo re and Akaash bhora. t2 caught up with the quartet...

Tell us a bit about your experiments with Tagore and why you chose his songs...

Ari: I love Tagore’s poetry and have much admiration for the man, whose songs are still sung today as a part of Bengali culture. It is similar to jazz, which is music for people across the socio-economic spectrum. Tagore himself worked with so many different forms; we wanted to take his work and open it up in whatever small way that we could.

Eli: I feel Tagore’s work has this wonderful message. I mean songs like Ekla chalo re are truly inspirational. Though some of our friends in the jazz circuit here raised their eyebrows, there were others who were supportive of our attempts and encouraged us.

Stefan: Initially, many of the singers we were working with were quite sceptical. But as we began to play, it became a beautiful marriage.

What about the actual technical process of combining jazz with Rabindrasangeet?

i: We started doing our research and within a week, had about 100 Mp3s of Tagore songs. We made a list and emailed it to our Bengali friends, who wrote back with suggestions on which songs we could focus on. Our music is akin to storytelling; the basic idea was to find the rasa in a particular song. It was also slightly difficult to grapple with the different timing and beat structures and mesh that with jazz rhythms. We had different singers who had different arrangements and we based our arrangements around these. It became a dynamic experience.

Stefan: On a musical level, the voice in Indian music is capable of much more than what our instruments can do. It takes constant improvisation to work with that.

Todd: Jazz musicians were introduced to Indian voice inflections and people like John Coltrane could render Indian music through their instruments. There lies the beauty of jazz: it incorporates things to come and things that have been.

What about Tagore’s music and its resonance with jazz?

Eli: His works are great artefacts of humanity, with melodies that grab you. These strong melodic themes are what we look for in jazz.

Ari: I was reading his poem Broken Song, where his idea of music is so close to how we, as jazz musicians, approach music.

Todd: Like many great musicians who return to folk art for inspiration, Tagore’s work is also a beautiful reflection of folk forms. This is what makes it easy to identify with; makes it ‘people music’.

Tell us about your project of popularising and creating awareness about jazz among people?

i: We want to make jazz a relevant part of the community and bring it back into pop culture. Thus, we work with educational institutions teaching jazz to pre-schoolers and adolescents. We teach them to tell stories through jazz and sing fairytales, like Jack and the Beanstalk, as well as perform in jazz drama programmes. We also work with corporate groups.

Ari: We want to bring back the spirit of jazz; give it back to the people. Jazz is all about self-expression within a communal context: 95 per cent of jazz was created in dancehalls and small bars, with a crowd ranging from sailors to socialites. We want to take it out of the academic framework and return it to this context.