Thursday, June 11, 2020

Carnatic Improvisations and Rock

In the course of reading about South Indian music, often referred to as Carnatic music I stumbled across this:


What it reminded me of most strongly was the free-floating trio improvisations of Cream. I have always thought of their music as being blues-based though Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker thought of it as being jazz-related. But listening to this Carnatic music, I hear so many of the typical rhythmic interactions and the kind of improvisatory flow of the music as being similar to what Cream were doing. I haven't heard this mentioned anywhere, but there is a huge Indian music tradition in England and the clip above is from a large festival of South Asian music held in London every year over three months.

Eric Clapton attributes his main influence to American blues, while Ginger Baker studied African drumming and Jack Bruce was a classical cellist. But isn't it possible that they also heard a lot of South Indian music as well? Here, have a listen, don't you hear some Carnatic inflections buried inside the rock song structure from the 3 minute mark:



2 comments:

Dex Quire said...

... one of the great things about your blog ... You always surprise Bryan ... wide boundaries of taste, enthusiasm, general knowledge of music ....

Anyway, yes, there is a real similarity between Cream and Carnatic -- improvising around a shifting but solid core (I think that is a contradiction, hope it makes sense). An even better example of Cream's "I'm So Glad" jam would be the cut from the 'Cream Goodbye' album; that version is filled with tremendous improvisation and fire. Back then, Clapton had a lighter, swifter, fruitier attack; in this video (Reunion at the Royal, I believe) Bruce and Baker seemed to retain their Cream-era force ...

Interesting that Frank Zappa often mentioned Indian ragas in a positive way. He felt his own jams were closer to Indian music than to jazz; he was not much drawn to jamming around jazz chord progressions, though he could handle them if the occasion (or composition) called for them .... he much preferred jamming around a floating one or two chord progression ...

Bryan Townsend said...

Thanks, Dex. Yes, that wild version of "I'm So Glad" from Cream Goodbye would be an excellent example.