BEING A HERO IS HARD WORK
Rudresh Mahanthappa left his cape and tights at home. But on this late-January afternoon, he’s leaping into action without them. The alert, brawny sound of his alto saxophone slashes through the air at Sound on Sound Studios in Montclair, New Jersey, where he’s gathered two dauntless partners—bassist François Moutin and drummer Rudy Royston—to answer the call of Hero Trio.
The band is attacking its third take of “I’ll Remember April,” a standard famously recorded at midcentury by Charlie Parker (for Charlie Parker with Strings) and Sonny Rollins (on A Night at the Village Vanguard). Mahanthappa’s arrangement adds a head-bobbing funk preface in 9/8 meter, then shifts to a bustling 4/4 swing. “Good,” he says, after the take ends with a decisive snap. “Let’s do another one. I feel like we were in it; let’s go again right now.”
Hero Trio, which Mahanthappa will release on Whirlwind Recordings, is so named because of the valiant musical figures it references: Parker and Rollins, to be sure, but also Stevie Wonder, whose “Overjoyed” provides another buoyant highlight, and Ornette Coleman, whose “Sadness” evokes the other end of the emotional scale. At Sound on Sound, the trio knocks out several takes of “Ring of Fire,” a defining anthem for Johnny Cash, with the same boxcar-shuffle rhythm as the original but an extra beat in the third bar, and a handful of flickering melodic ornamentations that speak to Mahanthappa’s interest in Indian classical music.
Having made more than a dozen albums of his own compositions, he seems invigorated by the art of interpretation. “I’ve been wanting to record a Johnny Cash tune for 20 years,” he says, to no one in particular, during a session break. (“Ring of Fire” was composed by June Carter Cash with Merle Kilgore,
