Raga jazz violinist brings East-meets-West show to Bay Area

Carnatic violinist Arun Ramamurthy is making the world safe for raga.

Raised in a highly cultured South Indian family in central New Jersey, he started to learn the classical music tradition by studying vocals with his mother, a respected Carnatic singer.

“My dad organized concerts and tours for Carnatic artists, so our house was filled with Carnatic music and musicians,” Ramamurthy said. “And out in the world I was hearing jazz and hip-hop and funk.”

He’s been on a mission ever since to connect the music of the hearth with the sounds he encountered outside his home. Involved in an array of ensembles created to bring together artists steeped in classical Indian music with other styles and idioms, Ramamurthy introduces his new raga jazz trio to the Bay Area over the next week with a series of performances.

After a solo recital Friday as part of vegan chef Philip Gelb’s Oakland dinner series, Ramamurthy kicks off a busy run of trio shows Saturday afternoon on a Yerba Buena Gardens Festival double bill with an all-star Cuban jazz combo led by saxophonist Yosvany Terry and vocalist Gema Corredera.

The Arun Ramamurthy Trio also performs July 5 in Campbell, headlining the Ainsley House’s Celebrate Indian Culture! program (which includes several pieces with the Leela Youth Dance Company and visual artist Kundan Baidwan), as well as at The Battery in San Francisco July 7 and Berkeley’s California Jazz Conservatory July 8 with an afternoon workshop and evening performance.

The trio’s West Coast debut is supported by a grant from South Arts, but Ramamurthy has performed several times in the Bay Area previously in collaborations spearheaded by Brooklyn Raga Massive. He and Fremont-raised drummer Sameer Gupta co-founded the BRM collective, which opened up vast new frontiers for musicians trained in North and South Indian classical music to join forces with artists from other traditions. They produced a weekly jam session and numerous projects, collaborations and commissions, like the epic 2017 performance of Terry Riley’s seminal minimalist composition “In C.”

Ramamurthy has been one of BRM’s primary explorers. There’s a duo violin project with his wife, violinist Trina Basu, reimagining string chamber music through a raga lens. He’s worked intensely to bridge Carnatic and classical Arabic music with Iraqi American trumpeter Amir ElSaffar in Raga Maqam. And he’s a charter member of Ragmala Go, an improvisation-based large ensemble led by world percussionist Adam Rudolph.

After investigating hybrid forms in numerous situations Ramamurthy decided to create the new trio “as an outlet for the music inside of me,” he said. “I felt and heard Carnatic music in a way that wasn’t always conventional, and I had a deep interest in expressing myself the way I feel and hear it in jazz, a tradition with true kinship to Carnatic music in its history and people and the spirit of improvisation.”

For the Bay Area run Ramamurthy’s trio is focusing on music from his upcoming album “New Moon Suite,” a work commissioned by Chamber Music America. The project represents both his evolution as a composer and bandleader and his debt to his ancestors, particularly his grandmother, a Carnatic violinist “who taught me to be true to yourself, Regardless of expectations,” he said.

Walking a parallel path combining his love of jazz and Hindustani classical music via drum kit, his Brooklyn Raga Massive partner Sameer Gupta was an obvious choice as a trio collaborator. Figuring out who would complete the triumvirate was more of a conceptual stretch, and electric bassist Damon Banks is part of what makes the group so distinctive.

A consummate New York artist with a vast and varied resume, he’s worked with Ramamurthy in Adam Rudolph’s Ragmala Go, “but I knew the trio was going to kick my butt,” Banks said, by plunging him into deeper raga waters where bass has little or no track record.

A residency in Vermont last year gave the trio a chance to really work out their sound. Banks, who’s performed in 30 countries but is making his Bay Area debut, has thrived in a situation with “two of the most generous and talented teachers,” he said.

“I’ve been able to observe my own growth, reimagining my role as a bassist. Now I can break out the peddle board and effects and get all ambient and funky and dirty. Raga is unlimited. People think of a scale or mode as something that’s limited, but it’s a blank canvas waiting for you to paint on.”

Comtact Andrew Gilbert at [email protected].

ARUN RAMAMURTHY TRIO

When & where: 1 p.m. July 1 at Yerba Buena Gardens Festival (with Yosvany Terry and Gema Corredera); free; ybgfestival.org; 7 p.m. July 7 at Celebrate Indian Culture!; Ainsley House, Campbell; free; www.campbellmuseums.com; 8 p.m. July 8 at California Jazz Conservatory, Berkeley; $25; concerts.cjc.edu.