Bird Calls by Rudresh Mahanthappa

After 60 years of hearing jazz, its universality continues to astound me. Here is an alto saxophonist of south Indian roots and parentage who was born in Trieste, Italy, in 1971 and grew up in Colorado, US, studied music at Berklee College, Boston and is now based in New York, who venerates the sound and artistry of one Charlie “Bird” Parker, a Kansas City black man who tore jazz conventions apart in the 1940s and ’50s, creating new forms of jazz from a searing blues foundation and changed its mood and sonics completely.

Rudresh Mahanthappa writes in the sleeve notes of his new album Bird Calls that his “world was forever changed” when he first heard records of Parker at the age of 12, another in a long line of saxophonists who have attested to similar bird-inspired provenances. “His sheer virtuosity and innovative vocabulary were obviously astounding,” he sets down, “but what moved and continues to inspire me is the joy, humour and beauty that he portrays, evokes and instills.”

Yet Bird Calls is not an imitative tribute album or a series of reprises of Parker’s tunes. Mahanthappa’s intention is to “absorb his work and give new shape and meaning to his gifts” in such a way as to “bridge” jazz and the “non-Western music so much a part of Mahanthappa’s history and heartsblood, and in doing so create sounds which are new, epochal and internationalist.

Yet the Parker echoes within the album are clear and resonant. Mahanthappa uses the familiar quintet formation of some of the Bird’s greatest creations — alto, trumpet, piano, bass and drums — as his instrumental basis, and all through the tracks there are snatches of Parker themes. Donna Lee, Parker’s Mood, Relaxin’ at the Camarillo and Now’s the Time are all reinvented.

Adam O’Farrill is the trumpeter, Matt Mitchell the pianist, Mahanthappa’s longtime bass confrere Francois Moutin is there and Rudy Royston is the drummer.

They set off with the title piece, led by Moutin’s groaning bowed bass and Mahanthappa’s Indian-sounding elegy shared by O’Farrill’s bent notes. On the DL borrows from Donna Lee with some dazzling alto runs from Mahanthappa broken by Mitchell’s sprinting keyboard chorus and a solo on the edge by O’Farrill.

The fanfarish harmonies between the horns of Bird Calls #2 preface Chillin’, based on Parker’s Relaxin’ at the Camarillo which was recorded in 1947 after Parker’s release from Camarillo psychiatric hospital outside Los Angeles. The horns palaver in a call-and-response colloquy above Royston’s animated drums with O’Farrill’s unfettered brass in powerful ascendant before Mahanthappa’s joyous reedsong flies through the walls of the Brooklyn studio: West Coast to East Coast, nearly seven decades later.

Parker’s Mood becomes a tune dedicated to Mahanthappa’s son Talin is Thinking after a long solo alto prologue. Kansas City blues are transformed into an Asian-succoured serpentine and reflective sonic essay with Mahanthappa at his most powerfully lyrical, and in Both Hands, inspired by Parker’s Dexterity, the once-revolutionary rhythmic compulsions and syncopated fury of bop become altogether a much freer and unchained leap into another century’s cosmopolitan and syncretic musical form.

Moutin plays a brilliantly bouncing solo to introduce Mahanthappa’s Gopuram, fired by Bird’s Steeplechase before the altoist from somewhere else plays a chorus from deep within his ancestors’ soundscape. It is jazz of the changing and unifying world from a room in New York with equipment which preserves and nourishes it.

Bop’s impatience with the predictable and conservative came, bursting out of Bird’s classic Now’s the Time, foretelling the social and political convulsions around civil rights which were to grow in its wake. Mahanthappa calls his conventional adaptation Maybe Later with much more circumspection, despite the fire in the horns and the relentless pounding of Royston’s drums. But Bird’s urgency is still calling with the promise of a “new world comin’” in his and Mahanthappa’s every note.