So it was likely, but by no means inevitable, that Mahanthappa would eventually make work that engaged Indian music overtly. He did it with “Kinsmen’’ (2008) a dazzling collaboration with Chennai-based saxophone master Kadri Gopalnath and a group of players from the jazz and Carnatic (South Indian classical) scenes.
And he has done it again - and by his own reckoning, more deeply - with “Samdhi,’’ a new album with a distinctive lineup of sax, electric guitar and bass, drum set and South Indian percussions. He visits Regattabar on Thursday to present this music.
On one level, “Samdhi’’ feels barely Indian at all. The electric instrumentation and particularly the virtuoso guitar of David Gilmore and bassist Rich Brown’s funk stylings evoke a jazz-rock (dare we say “fusion’’?) realm that listeners of Mahanthappa’s previous work, which is acoustic and sometimes knotty, might not have anticipated.
Not only that: Mahanthappa also integrates electronic effects, at times looping and fragmenting the sounds from his horn, or using Ableton Live software to duet with the laptop or have the computer “improvise.’’
So there is a lot going on here. Still, Mahanthappa explains by phone from a tour stop in Austria, “Samdhi’’ could not have happened without an immersion he made into Carnatic music in 2007-08, thanks to a Guggenheim fellowship.
The compositions draw on what he learned that year, bingeing at a major music festival in Chennai, then spending a month of intensive all-day study with Gopalnath and another with a Bangalore mridangam (percussion) master.
“The plan was to go to the festival, then go to India again and work on the melodic ornamentation,’’ he says. “How it fits into raga theory, and in specific ways to particular ragas.’’
