NOTE: bassist Patrick Thabo Mokoka, longtime bassist of Don Laka and a founder-member of the historic Malopoets died last week. For an obituary see: https://theconversation.com/remembering-pat-mokoka-of-the-malopoets-seminal-south-african-music-162655
Bansuri flute player Deepak Ram – whose most recent album, Indentured Blue Cane To Bamboo https://music.apple.com/za/album/indentured-blue-from-cane-to-bamboo/1515255668 landed last year – is and is not a South African.
Is, because he was born in Sophiatown in 1960, and his most formative musical experiences began in the family home in Lenasia they were forcibly removed to: a place he refers to ironically as an “Indian Reservation” created by the Group Areas Act.
Is not, because the universality of the spiritual truths accessible through music engage him passionately – so much so that he says he’s sometimes “tempted to write to the UN to create an International Day of Identity Fasting.
“Around the age of about 30, I began, consciously and deliberately, dispensing with the idea of identifying myself by race, nationality and religion. My ‘people’ and ‘community’ are spread all over the globe. I am equally proud of Ravi Shankar, John Coltrane, Bheki Mseleku and Debussy. While these musics are culturally informed, for me it’s a human effort.“
But Indentured Blue is a direct, deliberate acknowledgment of his heritage – “my great-grandparents were indentured, and while toiling in the cane fields might well have sung songs that were ‘blue’, for obvious reasons” – and so identity was one of the issues around the album that we discussed by email for this column.
Indentured Blue is somewhere around Ram’s 14th album, depending on whether you count the DVDs, early collaborations, and multiple compilations on which he features. But the two releases South Africans probably know best are the SAMA-winning 2000 Searching for Satyam https://www.amazon.com/Searching-Satyam-Deepak-Ram/dp/B000QZX58I , and the 1998 Flute for Thought https://www.amazon.com/Flute-Thought-Deepak-Ram/dp/B000QZY7EE whose compositions directly engaged with his upbringing.
Despite the confinement and restriction imposed by apartheid, the musical aspects of that upbringing could sometimes be magical. His home was filled with Indian classical and Bollywood film music, jazz and pop. His brothers, both players of Indian classical instruments, also “had a band called Sludge and jammed with some of the most influential South African jazz musicians.” (In an earlier interview, Ram recounted to me a garage jam including saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi – if only somebody had recorded that!).
And music had always entranced him. He told NPR: ” …as a kid growing up, any kind of music, I mean even marching bands, I would get goose pimples when I listened to them. I remember my brother making me my first flute from a drainpipe, you know, a heavy steel pipe. And he found a drill, and he arbitrarily just drilled 6 holes in the drainpipe. That was my first flute. It was fine. The sound itself was just, you know…”
After 18 months on that, he pursued studies that were more specialised. “When I heard the bansuri for the first time, I was ‘born again’, and found a teacher for bansuri and tabla at Tolstoy Farm, 3 kms from my hometown: Mr Jeram Bhana. I was 15. Within a year, I dropped out of high school (best decision in my life) and went to Mumbai, and for 25 years immersed myself into the study of Indian classical music, before journeying into jazz and western classical.”
After that first apprenticeship, Ram studied with Sri Suryakant Limaye, who bequeathed him a collection of flutes, Pandit Vijay Raghav Rao and, from 1981, Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia. He gained an M.Mus from Rhodes University in 1996 and taught for four years at the University of Duban-Westville. His first jazz teacher, whom he hails as a “tremendous influence”, was Darius Brubeck with whom he played on the album Gathering Forces II https://www.amazon.com/Gathering-Forces-Brubeck/dp/B000001MFJ . He has also collaborated with Tananas (on Orchestra Mundo https://www.amazon.com/Orchestra-Mundo-Tananas/dp/B0000082N0 ) Tours have taken him to Europe and the Middle East and Ram is currently based in the USA, where he has taught, among others, at USC Santa Cruz. Subsequent collaborations have included Mseleku in London, Dhaffer Youssef, Buddha Bar, Juno Reactor and David Sylvain.
On Indentured Blue, Ram works in duo with bassist Pepe Gonzalez.
“Pepe was the first Jazz musician I met when I moved to DC. He was born in Spain but came to DC as a child , he is sensitive as a person and musician , and we connect well on many levels. We never rehearse before gigs, and only an hour rehearsal before this recording …..I love bass behind me , more than piano or guitar, because it leaves open spaces , while still keeping the changes. Pepe also listens a lot to my recordings of Indian classical music, and he provides the space and breath needed for a bamboo flute.”
The duo combination certainly works: a delicate empathy between the two players is audible on all eight tracks. Those are a mixed bag: four compositions from Coltrane – including Naima, which he first recorded on the 2016 album Steps – and four from Ram, including the title track. It’s on two of the ‘Trane tracks that the contrast between Ram’s two musical faces is most audible: Equinox shows how strongly he can swing; on A Love Supreme (perhaps appropriately given the tune’s deep meaning) the jazz structure and instantly recognisable melodic theme are stated and carried by Gonzalez, and it’s he, not Ram, who finally brings the tune back home. The flute, by contrast, takes journeys much more idiomatic to the Indian classical tradition. But it is not an attempt at crude ‘fusion’; rather it works as a conversation between two musics (thematic spine and modal exploration) and is probably my favourite track.
Indentured Blue is an enchanting, absorbing album, which lets Ram give free rein to his enduring affection for jazz, but also occupy the liminal ground where it can meet other traditions. It’s also a great example of what happens when two musicians set aside ego simply to play together. The voice of the flute is, as ever, breathtakingly beautiful. I’ve been listening to it a lot.
And that takes us back to the power of music to erase boundaries. Ram told NPR: “The symbolism of the flute is that when Lord Krishna played his flute … everybody who heard this, including the animals and the cows, forgot their own individual identities and found themselves running towards the sound, which is the ultimate truth or reality.” And for his own next pilgrimage towards the truth of sound, “I’m about to ‘study’ Dexter Gordon….it’s a long journey.”
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