South Asian-American jazz from New York

Mahanthappa is Boulder-born-and-raised, second son of an Indian-immigrant physics professor and his wife, also from India. Rudresh was obsessed with Baroque recorder music as a child, then switched to sax in high school, especially taken with a strange album his brother gave him called Saxophone Indian Style. Yep, Kadri Gopalnath had recorded that. Mahanthappa was moved to study jazz at North Texas State University, Berklee School of Musaic, and De Paul in Chicago, where he got his MA; he now teaches at the New School Jazz Program. He is thoroughly New Yorkitized, has been to India twice, as a Berklee student and a Guggenheim fellow, and has recorded voluminously with fellow jazz musicians of his generation and South Asian descent -- besides Abassi, pianist Vijay Iyer, drummer Sunny Jain and guitarist Fareed Haque. Other good musicians are in on this, too, cf drummer Dan Weiss.I'm not the only professional listener to have Kinsmen on a 10 best list; several members of the Jazz Journalists Association cite it, and Mahanthappa ranked as the one-and-only mentioned runner up in the Village Voice jazz poll run by Francis Davis this week. 

(By the way, can you believe the Voice fired Nat Hentoff??? At age 83, after he's worked for them 50 years and can be cranky, yes, but genuinely has something to say in righteous defense of civil liberties in the USA, here, that is, at home!!! What is with this? Save money by firing Hentoff!?!)