But it wasn’t until he was nineteen and attending Reed College in Oregon that he surrendered completely to the sounds of Indian music after attending a concert by the great sarod master, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. His father discovered Al Green and Blondie and founded Bell Records (later Arista Records), and he remembers being at recording sessions for “Devil In a Blue Dress” at the age of eight. As the son of a music business executive in New York, he grew up around music. Before he ever went to India and immersed himself in other musical traditions, Jai was a Sixties teenager weaned on the Beatles, Dylan. The references to the Beatles and traveling are apt. Each song created its own unique environment and yet they were all tied together.” “Actually Revolver was kind of a model for this album. “My music is about traveling,” Jai points out. Jai’s rendition of “Tomorrow Never Knows/Shivaya” the Beatles classic from Revolver, is a case in point: singularly melodic verses in English followed by soaring Sanskrit invocations to Lord Shiva (the energy of transformation), that take the listener on a journey from one world to the next and back.
While the rhythms and melodies are consistently organic, the textures are tripped out and electronic”. “Mondo Rama takes the seeds of what I’ve been doing with Indian and World Music and spreads them in various directions: dance music, sampling, turntablism, Appalachian, Brazilian, blues, and Middle Eastern…. “Sometimes it spoke to me, and sometimes I spoke to it”. “The album seemed to grow and grow with a life and energy of its own”. This multitude of experiences went into the making of Mondo Rama.
“During the time of conceiving and producing this CD I did a lot of travelling Israel, Brazil, Fiji, and India, each time returning to my home in the Oakland-Berkeley area where boom boxes and car sub-woofers are the preferred way of hearing music”. “This album is both a progression and a departure,” Jai reflects. With Mondo Rama, his new release on Narada/Virgin, he breaks still new ground, pushing the boundaries of contemporary world fusion and yet offering his most accessible music to date-an infectious blend that aims Uttal right at a pop mainstream audience. For years Jai Uttal has occupied a special place in the vanguard of the world music movement, delighting an international audience by embracing an extraordinary variety of cultures and musical traditions ranging from Appalachia to the rock of the 1960s to the Kirtan chants of ancient India.
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