Steve Hochman on October 3rd, 2015

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There’s probably some Columbus joke to be made about American and European jazz musicians discovering Indian sounds and styles. You know — John Coltrane meeting Ravi Shankar, Miles Davis going modal, John McLaughlin exploring raga styles in his electric Mahavishnu Orchestra and acoustic Shakti. It all opened up the language of jazz in some very exciting ways.

Just one thing. Indian musicians had already discovered jazz themselves — decades earlier, as it happened — and had already expanded that language.

The fruits of both sides of that exchange will be heard Tuesday at UCLA’s Royce Hall, with the appearance of an East-West supergroup of always-adventurous tabla player Zakir Hussain, English bass titan Dave Holland, keyboardist/composer Louiz Banks (“the Godfather of Indian Jazz”), vocalist Shankar Mahadevan and guitarist Amit Chatterjee.

||| Live: “The Story of Indian Jazz,” with Zakir Hussain, Dave Holland, Shankar Mahadevan, Louiz Banks and Amit Chatterjee, Tuesday at the CAP UCLA, Royce Hall. Tickets.

These musicians have extensive credentials, including landmark work with Davis (Holland anchored the “Bitches Brew” sessions, among others), with McLaughlin (Hussain co-founded Shakti in the mid-’70s and Mahadevan joined in a later version, while Banks played on a more recent McLaughlin album “Floating Point”) and with Weather Report’s Joe Zawinul (Chatterjee was in his band for more than a decade). Banks and Mahadevan have also worked together in various projects, including the Indo-jazz fusion band SILK.

Dave Holland (Photo by Mark Higashino)

But to give context for the project, Hussain says, we must look back to the very Jazz Age itself, the Roaring ’20s. The first Indian jazz moves were tied to the genesis of the very Bollywood film business, set off with the same sparks.

“In the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, Hollywood’s influence in India were very strong,” he says.

Indians became enraptured with Hollywood musicals and a demand for locally produced fare was huge. And with musicals must come, uh, music.

“What would appeal to the mass audiences was a combo of Hollywood film styles and Indian stuff,” he says. “They all heard the songs of Porter and Berlin and Gershwin and were very inspired.”

The British Raj was still there, he notes, with western music and musicians.  And there were Indians — some of mixed heritage from the Portuguese and British colonial presence, who had become proficient on western instruments and styles.

“They were hired to become session people to play bebop and swing along with the tablas and sitars and sarangais of India,” he says. “And a strange music appeared in the films. You listen to some music of India from the ’30s and ’40s and you will hear very strong swing and bop influences. This was never really talked about.”

The influences remained strong enough that in the 1960s a young Banks picked up on them with such devotion that his first name was changed by his father in honor of Louis Armstrong.

||| Stream: The Louiz Banks’ composition “The Encounter”

To be clear, that’s not really what we’ll be hearing at Royce — though Hussain can’t give an exact description of what this will sound like. The quintet is brand-new, the first performances coming just days before this show in a stint at the SFJazz Center in San Francisco, where he is serving as resident artistic director. As they exchanged recordings and thoughts in the lead-up to the shows, the project was more of a philosophy, really, though one grounded in the nature of the supreme talents involved.

“The idea is to play jazz,” Hussain says. “I felt it was important to acknowledge the commitment to the form, which is the American form, jazz, and bringing over some of these people and put them under the guidance of someone like Dave Holland, a most distinguished musician who can drive the band with both his rhythm and wisdom.”

Hussain’s role seems to be, in addition to his presence as arguably the world’s top tabla player, is as sort of a conceptual wrangler. It’s a role he’s taken in decades of projects with rich results. Relatively recent ones range from the Masters of Percussion tours (with drummers from various cultures and traditions, including long-time friend and frequent collaborator Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead) to the recent Distant Kin project bringing Indian and Celtic musicians together under the auspices of the Scottish Arts Council for a series of concerts, captured in a delightful new live album recorded at the SFJazz Center.

||| Stream: Zakir Hussain, “Jig O’Beer & Chai,” feat. Jean-Michel Veillon, Charlie McKerron, Ganesh Rajagopalan, Fraser Fifield, Rakesh Chaurasia, Tony Byrne, Patsy Reid and John Joe Kelly:

And while he’s doing this jazz project, he’s just made time for a foray to Mumbai for the premiere of his concerto for tabla and orchestra. So yeah, his oft-flurrying hands are full. But the jazz project holds a special place for him.

“My job is just as a facilitator, to make sure everybody is going to do what they want to do with total freedom,” he says. “Louiz Banks sent me eight tunes and said we can play all these. I had to say, ‘Down boy. Calm down. The whole band has to contribute.’ It’s a band collective. A collective message and statement will be put forth. And it will be about jazz.”