Globally acclaimed pianist and composer Charu Suri only discovered jazz four years ago.
Suri, who kicks off a four-night residency at Detroit’s Cliff Bell’s jazz club Thursday, March 7, had been a lifelong classical pianist when a trip to New Orleans changed everything.
“I attended a concert at Preservation Hall and it changed my life,” she said. “It really did. It’s just a magical place. The music sunk into my soul and I said, ‘This is what I need to be doing’ — so I started composing my first jazz album.”
Five albums later, Indian-born Suri has carved out a unique niche in jazz that no other performer is practicing, by marrying the American art form with raga, a form of ancient Indian classical music dating back to the first millennium C.E.
“There was a sound in my head that just wouldn’t stop bugging me,” she said. “It just kept coming in, and there were all these raga bass sounds. They wouldn’t go away, so I started writing them down. And then I started playing them at concerts along with standards, and people would come up to me and go, ‘Yeah, we know all the standards — what was that? Play more of that!
“Ragas are supposed to be played at a certain time of day,” she explained. “So, when I say, ‘This is an evening raga’ or, ‘This is an afternoon raga,’ people feel the different energies. Chopin (did that) with his nocturnes, but in Western canon music that’s not really a mindset. Everything is so fast, and the ragas really anchor you and force you to live in that moment. In that way, it’s been healing for me as well.”
The first female Indian jazz artist to play New York’s legendary Carnegie Hall, she’ll return there for the fourth time next month.
In Detroit, she’ll be joined by her longtime bassist J. Brunka and Detroit native Louis Jones III on drums. They’ll play two shows each evening of their residency, with 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. start times Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. start times on Sunday, March 10. Tickets for each show are $25.
Suri confesses she was “nervous” about introducing raga jazz just a few years ago.
“I just wasn’t sure what the jazz community would say, because it’s still very new,” she said. “But they’ve been really great about it. I still have a lot to learn in the jazz world, and I still take weekly lessons. I want to be the best I can possibly be in both these genres of world music. I’ve been very much in awe of how people have accepted me and are willing to learn more about it, including musicians who want to learn more about how to riff on a raga.”
Witness one of the newest forms of jazz at Cliff Bell’s, only this weekend in downtown Detroit.
Contact Free Press arts and culture reporter Duante Beddingfield at dbeddingfield@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Charu Suri, who marries jazz with Indian raga music, to play Detroit
