Rudresh Mahanthappa plays it by the numbers
Any old sax player can make the pages of Downbeat. Indian-American altoist Rudresh Mahanthappa was recently featured in Wired and Science magazines after his latest CD, "Codebook" (Pi), caught the attention of tech-heads by basing a set of compositions on cryptography and number theory. Mahanthappa previously released an album of tunes based on the speech cadences of several Indian languages. "Codebook" has pieces based on Morse code translations of his quartet's names ( Vijay Iyer on piano, bassist Francois Moutin and drummer Dan Weis) and the Fibonacci sequence, an obscure number set made famous in "The Da Vinci Code." But no secret decoder rings are necessary to decipher the passionate interplay of this inventive quartet
Any old sax player can make the pages of
Downbeat
. Indian-American altoist
Rudresh Mahanthappa
was recently featured in
Wired
and
Science
magazines after his latest CD, "Codebook" (Pi), caught the attention of tech-heads by basing a set of compositions on cryptography and number theory. Mahanthappa previously released an album of tunes based on the speech cadences of several Indian languages. "Codebook" has pieces based on Morse code translations of his quartet's names (
Vijay Iyer
on piano, bassist
Francois Moutin
and drummer
Dan Weis
) and the Fibonacci sequence, an obscure number set made famous in "The Da Vinci Code." But no secret decoder rings are necessary to decipher the passionate interplay of this inventive quartet
International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 8 tonight, $12, 215-387-5125, www.arsnovaworkshop.com.
- Shaun Brady