A world of sound
ANAND DORASWAMI
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Whether playing the saxophone or the nadaswaram, teaching or collaborating with Indian musicians, Charlie Mariano's focus is music.
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Jazz, his life: Charlie Mariano
"BEAUTIFUL country, Italy," says Carmine Ugo (better known as Charlie) Mariano. "Sometimes I wish my parents hadn't migrated to the U.S. but had stayed there."
"But you mightn't have got interested in jazz as early as you did," I object. He agrees. Just think how much or little a boy born in 1923 would have heard of Lester Young on the radio in Mussolini's Italy. Or Coleman Hawkins. Or Ben Webster, Johnny Hodges, Benny Carter...
Part of a revolution
It was the incomparable honey tones of Lester Young's tenor saxophone that set the 13-year-old Carmine on the road to making jazz his life-work, although he took up the alto sax of Hodges rather than the tenor as his main instrument.
By the beginning of the 1940s he was already performing swing jazz in public, but before his style had fully developed the music had undergone a sea-change with the be-bop revolution, which he'd become part of by the end of the decade.
In the early 1950s, when he was for some time with the older music in the Stan Kenton big band — which he left because big bands were too constricting — the originators of be-bop came and played as guests with them.
"What a musician! And a real sweetheart!" he says enthusiastically about Dizzy Gillespie. When I ask about the contrasting reputation of Charlie Parker, the other giant of bop, as a bit of a nasty character, he vehemently disagrees. "No, he was a sweetheart too!"
"Why Germany?" I ask, referring to the country where he decided to settle down in the 1970s rather than the beautiful land of his forebears.
"Well, I really wanted to get away from the U.S. I was teaching at Berklee College of Music (in Boston) and it was too much of a 9-to-5. Germany was the easiest country in Europe to settle down in permanently."
Before that he'd already discovered Eastern music, when he went to live in Japan with his then wife, Toshiki Akiyoshi, a well-known jazz pianist. He got interested in the imperial court music that came from China, and then kept alive in Japan while it died out in China.
It was an assignment from the U.S. Government with Radio Malaysia in the mid-60s that got him interested in Carnatic music. He visited a temple in Kuala Lumpur, heard the nadaswaram, and decided he wanted to play it. He learnt to read and write the musical notation in Tamil and mastered the instrument enough to perform on it in public for much of the 1970s. He actually came to India for the first time in 1973, when his teacher moved back to Pudukottai in Tamil Nadu from Malaysia. Over the years, his contacts with India broadened, starting with 1976, when he met Louis Banks (Mumbai-based keyboardist) and Ramesh Shotham (Germany-based percussionist), with both of whom he has worked.
Contact with Carnatic
For the last 25 years, he's worked with the Karnataka College of Percussion, especially its leading lights, the husband and wife team of T.A.S. Mani (mridangist) and R.A. Ramamani (vocalist).
"They've been very good to me. They treat me like family, in fact this is the first time I've hired a house and not lived with them." His visits to Bangalore over the years have resulted in many concerts and a few albums, and he's been responsible for introducing their collaborative music to Europe.
In fact, it's just two days since Mariano, Mani, Ramamani, Shotham and Mike Herting (keyboardist-pianist from Germany who was with them in their recent concert in Bangalore) recorded an album.
Paradoxically, Mariano gave up the nadaswaram 25 years ago because it's "too loud" and interferes with the vocalist. In India he only plays the alto sax, because he says he's not strong enough to carry several instruments, but he still adds the soprano sax and the flute to his armoury in Germany.
He plays mainstream jazz there with a group that includes Dieter Ilg on bass and Wolfgang Haffner on drums, but he also has duo collaborations with Quique Sinesi, an Argentinian tango guitarist, and Tchaouki Smahi, an Algerian oud player.
His regular visits to India took him this time to a place near Madurai for ayurvedic treatment. He gave it up because "it was too countrified. I'm a city boy". Luckily for us, the hustle and bustle of Bangalore is city life enough for him.
"I hope I have a few years more," he says. I second that, hoping we'll keep seeing more of this octogenarian phenomenon whose frailties seem to vanish magically when he's on the concert stage. And he's a sweetheart too.
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