Rajazz
About
« Rajazz » consist of a way of organizing the notes and are represented as musical mandalas.
I have always had this image of music: it is as if I was on a hilltop, arms open to embrace the land in front of me, and watching the 180° panorama stretching to infinity… In this vast landscape, I contemplate our heritage, from Bach to Debussy, but also jazz, blues, rock, Latin-American, African music, rap, electronic music, and all the styles born in the 20th century. A vast landscape… And one day I discovered the ragas world and I realized this was something totally different, but as wide as what I knew: another musical world extremely rich, not « tonal » anymore but « modal » this time. And suddenly I realized that if I turned around, arms still open towards the horizon, I would discover the remaining 180° of the landscape. From this central perspective, I suddenly wanted to do everything I could to keep on embracing this whole landscape… The Rajazz is a concept I have developed to mix these two ways of contemplating the musical landscape.
The concept of « rajazz » comes from a mix between tonal music and Indian modal music. The name is a contraction of raga and jazz : rajazz.
After switching from the practice of tonality to the practice of modality, I realized that the improvisation rules mainly differed by their primary intention itself: whereas the raga improviser is limited to 5, 6 or 7 notes throughout an hour and seeks to explore all the possibilities to getjust onebut very defined colour, the jazz musician, for his part, seeks to play « out », to use as wide a variety of notes as possible above each colour and to create colour changes in many different ways… The way to approach the musical material – the notes – is therefore fundamentally different. So I tried to create a “set” of notes implementing rules that respect the expectations of both systems. “Rajazz” is the result.
The clearest way to represent a rajazz is with a kind of musical mandala (see diagrams).
Its raw material is based on identical pentatonics (5 notes) going up and down.
Rajazz # 1, for example, is constructed on the pentatonic – 1 b3 4 5 6 -, in Bb for the central tonality, which results in – sib reb mib fa sol -.
As in a raga, I state the will and constraint to stick to a melodic material but I balance it with the will of the jazz musician to open his range of colours as much as possible using the existing intervals as pivots to be able to reach this same pentatonic, but in any of his converted versions, and successively from one to the other according to the potentiel paths. The system is binding but you can discover a great freedom in it.
Later, several rajazz can be combined to complicate the system. The melodic-harmonic colour range then extends exponentially.
The Rajazz I have explored up to now are :
- Rajazz #1 : 1 b3 4 5 6
- Rajazz #2 : 1 b3 #4 5 6
- Rajazz #3 : 1 b3 4 b6 7
- Rajazz #4 : 1 b3 4 6 7
- Rajazz #5:1 b3 5 b6 7
- Rajazz #6 : 1 3 5 b6 7
Besides the improvisation techniques from the rajazz that require much study as you must literally train your mind to a new « multipolar » way of thinking intervals, the theory also nourishes my exploration as a composer, but given the melodic-harmonic quality generated by these combinations, I stick to composing for solo instruments for now. This piece of writing also allows me to go further in my quest for a music at the crossroads of styles, incorporating elements of jazz, contemporary music and world music all together. A general approach that once again aims to consider music as a whole, avoiding stylistic classification as much as possible.