Vijay Iyer + Prasanna + Nitin Mitta = TIRTHA at the Crystal Ballroom Saturday, February 25 @ 3:00pm

The U.S. Bank Portland Jazz Festival Presented by Alaska Airlines announce Vijay Iyer + Prasanna + Nitin Mitta = TIRTHA in a program titled “New York to Tamil Nadu” at the Crystal Ballroom on Saturday, February 25th at 3:00pm.

Individually, Indian-American pianist-composer Vijay Iyer, Chennai (formerly Madras) born guitarist/composer Prasanna, and Hyderabad native and tabla player Nitin Mitta are already highly accomplished artists who shift easily among multiple musical languages. Together, they have achieved a fully realized, deeply thoughtful, and truly innovative collaboration. Combining the elemental directness of rock, the chamber-like intimacy of raga, and bebop’s hard, angular drive, Tirtha achieves a profound interplay of melody and rhythm that characterizes jazz at it’s best.

These artists’ musical and cultural experiences are part of their creative DNA. For example, you hear the distinctly South Indian, meticulous ornamentations of Prasanna’s guitar in dialogue with Iyer’s gloriously spacious harmonic palette, and Mitta’s superbly crisp Hindustani (north Indian classical) grooves and virtuosic, grounding presence. You hear familiar structural elements of jazz, Hindustani, and Carnatic music. However, the group completely shuns any musical clichés or previously heard “fusions” of those genres.

Iyer summarizes, “For us Tirtha represents a unity that only recently became possible, after several decades of South Asian global mobility, transition, and flow: it’s the sound of a new reality.”