links from uprisemgt.com

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/features/22_07_02_b.htm

Tabla Beat Science melds East with West ­ but loses neither 
Performers put Indian percussion, string and wind instruments alongside
progressive drum'n'bass 

Jim Quilty 
Daily Star staff 

Every year, one concert at Beiteddine towers over the rest in cool. 
Last year it was a tough call since the Chouf festival hosted both the
postmodern strains of the Kronos Quartet and the Ottoman jazz fusion work of
oud master Kudsi Erguner. 
In 2000, the cache of cool was more easily allocated to Shakti ­ John
McLaughlin's fusion group that mixed his silky jazz guitar into a classical
Indian ensemble anchored by Indian tabla master Zakir Hussain. 
This year, cool means Tabla Beat Science. The focal point, again, is Zakir
Hussain. 
Like Shakti, Tabla Beat Science performs an exciting mix of East and West,
but it would be a misnomer to call the stuff "fusion." At the core of the
sound are Indian percussion, string and wind instruments and vocals.
Alongside this is progressive drum'n'bass ­ that driving, minimalist dance
music. 

These two sensibilities don't fuse ­ indeed in concert they occupy different
sides of the stage ­ they thrust against and deflect off each other to get
the sparks flying. The amplified instruments assail the classical,
threatening to overwhelm or subvert them. Ultimately, though, the apparent
contradictions resolve themselves as musical dialogue. 
Hussain's creative counterpart in Tabla Beat Science is American bass player
and producer Bill Laswell. A foot soldier in New York's No Wave scene in the
late 1970s and early 1980s, Laswell has since formed several progressive
bands and collaborated with numerous artists. 
On the classical side, Hussain was supported by Ustad Sultan Khan on sarangi
(the classical Indian violin) and vocals and Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia,
who played an array of bamboo flutes. 

Laswell was joined on his side of the stage by Fabian Alsultany on
synthesizers and DJ Disk on turntables. Straddling these musical
sensibilities were a pair of New York-based musicians. 
On drum kit was Indian-born percussionist Karsh Kale, a long-time Laswell
collaborator who is himself a tabla adept. Adding a third distinct element
to this elaborate mix was Iranian-born vocalist and performance artist
Sussan Deyhim, who has a reputation for bringing a progressive sensibility
and instrumentation to her interpretation of traditional Middle Eastern
music. 
Contrary to what the ads promised, however, Beiteddine didn't host the
entire Tabla Beat Science crew. 
Absent were electronic noisemeister MIDIval Punditz and the ensemble's
second vocalist, the Ethiopian-born Ejigayehu Shibabaw. Gigi, her nom de
voix, was sorely missed by the highly visible East African contingent in the
audience, who'd bussed up the side of the mountain dressed to the nines,
some bearing Ethiopian flags, just to hear this ascending star sing in her
native Amharic. 

The evening began in Indian. Hussain and Sultan Khan performed an extended
duo reminiscent of a classical raga. The piece began as a plaintive sarangi
solo punctuated by percussion, then gradually swelled to become a
conversation between strings and tabla, before exploding into an alternating
series of ecstatic improvisations. 
About 20 minutes into this conversation, Laswell, Kale and Alsultany took
the stage, and in seconds the raga was augmented and attenuated into ambient
drum'n'bass. 
After the climax of this extended opening number, Sussan Dayhim joined the
group. More than anyone else on stage she brought a jazz sensibility to the
proceedings. Her first number saw her wordless vocals accompanied by the
sarangi, which soon developed into a vocal duet. 
The interplay between Deyhim and Sultan Khan's Indian-inflected vocals was
fascinating to watch. Her jazz diva persona collided with the
improvisational aspects of his vocal technique in way that was at times
muscular and sensual, at others cool and aloof. At one point, their duet
dissolved into a low-intensity, bilingual scat. 

The master of ceremonies for the evening was clearly Hussain, who moved
effortlessly from classical to pop arrangements, stared trance-like through
complex solo improvisations and clowned around during his duets with the
other instrumentalists ­ showing us again that the tabla is fully capable of
a walking bassline or the opening strains of the William Tell Overture. 
It wasn't a surprise that the audience sometimes didn't know what to do with
this music. Eager to be pleased, and programed to applaud with any break in
the music, the Beiteddine audience filled up the pauses built into the raga
duets with nervous cheers. 
Aside from the music itself, one of the highlights of the concert was simply
watching the performers enjoying their groove. Sometimes this came as the
musicians were improvising off each other ­ as during Deyhim's duets with
Sultan Khan ­ occasionally it was apparent when musicians sat through a
number. For some reason it was oddly entertaining to see a classical Indian
musician in Punjabi dress busily slapping his thigh, keeping time to a tabla
duet. 

http://www.cyniscurity.com/billlaswell.htm

Mutations and Creation

By Derek Beres

Bill Laswell is one of those musicians who you've heard a billion times and
may never have recognized the name. Remixing classics by Bob Marley and
Miles Davis, as well as some ten billion or other fusion projects mutating
African rhythms, Cuban percussion, and South Asian atmospherics, he is one
of the hardest working musicians/producers in the industry. With an upcoming
tour and release of Tabla Beat Science's Live in San Francisco at Stern
Grove (Axiom/Palm) - Tabla Beat Science being the incredible fusion of
Laswell, Indian guru musicians Sultan Khan and tabla player Zakir Hussain,
Karsh Kale, Gigi, and Fabian Alsultany - I recently caught up with him to
discuss his creative visions of this groundbreaking futurism. 

When did you first become involved with Indian music?
I was about 14 or 15, and I had already started listening to rock music and
everything else that was more easily accessible. Somehow I had managed to
get a ticket to a Ravi Shankar concert. At that time there were a lot of
psychedelic music in rock, people were using effects and distortion as ways
to affect sound. On the way to the concert someone spiked me with LSD. I had
never been on acid before. When I got to the concert it started to come into
perspective (laughs). That music has an inherent drone and a pretty intense
rhythm; it became incredibly psychedelic. My memory of first hearing it was
that this was the greatest psychedelic music I've ever heard. I was
immediately attracted to just hearing more without realizing what the effect
of that event was. That's how I was initiated; I got a kind of enhanced
version. Even now when we play with Zakir I still remember that kind of
intensity and that phase, that psychedelic experience.

What are the origins of Tabla Beat Science?
Obviously the name of Zakir Hussain was crucial in this area. Over time I
wanted to gravitate toward working with somebody like that. The idea of
Tabla Beat Science was to juxtapose that style of playing with repetitive
electronic music, which in some cases has the same tempo and syncopation
even - not as advanced and not as musical -but there is a design there. Then
with people like Talvin Singh and State of Bengal, many people contributed
to this new fusion, the juxtaposition of classical and electronic. We're
fortunate to have a situation where we have a couple of the master musicians
involved and not just sampling and incorporating, but actually interacting.

I've always found something incredibly universal in the pure sound of the
tabla.
If it's done right - and obviously we have access to it being done right -
[it is] clearly the most diverse and multi-faceted instrument. You can play
melody, bass, middle, top - there's no drum that has that wide of a musical
possibility. It has to be the most advanced for a hand drum, a finger plays
the rhythm and not the hand, which already makes it sound like ten drummers,
whereas with hand drums clearly one person is playing one or two drums.
There's no comparison. 

Do you see any dangers to tradition in this type of fusion?
I never see dangers of classical tradition because I don't come from a
tradition, whether classical or not. Older people, with more of an academic
approach to music and more fixed ideals of how things should stay - and
certainly with a background of having studied and grown up that things
should be a certain way - there's a real danger of anything that challenges
the structures that exist. I don't have a problem because I don't have a
culture, I don't have a tradition, and I don't have a school that taught me
that this is how it is. I just mutate and destroy things and make a mess and
people either like it or they don't. My culture is on the other side, it
hasn't even happened yet.

Purists tend not to be so open-minded.