Romance with the Ragas

Helen Sung

By Alifiya Khan

Helen Sung’s love for Indian music isn’t something that she would just profess for the sake of it. The New York-based jazz pianist means business when she says that. So enamoured was Sung by the ‘ragas’ that she took a six-month class in Indian classical music in Boston. “I adore Indian classical music and wanted to learn the finer details and the nuances which prompted me to take up the course. And I can go on listening to the tabla for hours, I am in love with the tempo and the beats,” says Sung while going off into an imitation of a tabla performance. Sung who was on her fifth visit to India, performed on the first day of the three-day international jazz festival hosted by Shisha Cafe.
Her first visit to India was in 1996, when she came as part of a student group. “I was studying jazz Boston and I remember visiting four cities and taking so many pictures,” she recalls. Her next visit was to perform at a jazz festival in Mumbai where she performed with veterans such as Russell Malone, Igor Butman and Diane Witherspoon.
Though many think of India as a place of Bollywood music, film, and dance — which are a few of its greater cultural exports — Sung wants it to be known that the country does have it’s own jazz style and share of appreciators. “Every place in the world has a local slant which is also the nature of jazz — it is a generous art form which retains its purity and yet allows for many different flavours. As far as audiences go, I think India is pretty mature and is also an audience that sincerely appreciates what we do. Unlike the West, people here don’t take things for granted,” she adds.
However, she did observe that just like the rest of the world, audiences at jazz concerts in India too are generally from the older lot. “I think this is a problem with jazz music across the world and a lot of this has to do with the stigma associated to it — of being over-intellectual. People think jazz is complicated, needs deep knowledge to be appreciated. And while I agree that jazz is a more ‘heavy’ form, you don’t have to learn what jazz is all about, you feel it,” she says.
Speaking about her own journey with jazz, the trained classical pianist says she took to jazz by accident. Born to Chinese immigrants who moved to Texas for her graduate schooling, it was the piano that she learnt, when she was five. “I got hooked to jazz after attending a Harry Connick Jr concert. I didn’t know who he was but his energy, the banging of keys, his disregard for all the techniques that I had learnt, left me dumbstruck,” she recalls. Later she studied at the Thelonious Monk Institute in Boston before moving to New York where she is now settled.
With five albums under her belt, her latest being 2014 release Anthem for a New Day, Sung is working on her next project (part of a fellowship grant) with an American songwriter.
Having previously performed with some of the well-known names in the jazz circuit including swing trumpeter Clark Terry, bebop pianist Barry Harris, trombonists Slide Hampton and many others, ask her for her wishlist of Indian collaborators and she doesn’t bat an eyelid before she exclaims, “Zakir Hussain! He is fantastic and I really hope we work together someday. He is such a fine artist, and has such mastery over his work.”