Mantra Revealed
Since it began, jazz has been—like America itself—a place where disparate and diverse streams have met as they flow towards the ocean. Consider Boston-based pianist/composer Marc Rossi and the members of the Marc Rossi Group as ambassadors from an exotic locale where the dizzying modal runs of South and North Indian music swirl and blend with jazz and Afro-Latin forms. These deep, rich waters have nourished musicians before; think of Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Impressions of Eurasia or Ellington’s Far East Suite. Think of the Miles Davis/Gil Evans collaboration Sketches of Spain or the Mahavishnu Orchestra. John McLaughlin himself, the grand master of eastern jazz fusion, commenting on Rossi’s composition and performance calls the work:
“very nice indeed!”
With Mantra Revealed, Rossi continues the work he began on Hidden Mandala: bearing the standard for pan-Indian jazz fusion into the present tense and beyond.
As a student of both Hindustani and Carnatic Indian music and a professor of piano and jazz composition at Berklee College of Music, Rossi has been a vital part of the Boston music scene for the past two decades, and he’s assembled an all-star cast for Mantra Revealed. Lance Van Lenten (saxophone and flute), Bill Urmson (electric bass), Mauricio Zottarelli (drums), and Rossi himself make up the core Marc Rossi Group, supplemented by Prassana’s adventurous, Indian-inflected guitar on opener “Jazz Impressions of a Kriti,” the sumptuous voice of Geetha Ramanathan Bennett, and the furious fret work of Bruce Arnold.
The album’s rich panoply of colors and textures comes from the interplay of Rossi’s own distinctive compositions and the players’ absorbing improvisational skills. It’s become commonplace to refer to an album as a “journey” these days, but few navigate a path as wide-ranging, engaging and multi-hued as Mantra Revealed.
