PopMatters Interview
“When I first met and spoke with the alto saxophonist and composer Rudresh Mahanthappa over a dozen years ago, he was still an up-and-comer, recently recorded by the also-new-to-the-scene Pi Recordings. He had been in New York City for a while, after getting music degrees at Berklee and DePaul, and he had been playing with pianist Vijay Iyer in various formats, creating a name, a style, and a sound.
…In that first interview, he told me a riveting story about finding his name listed for the first time in the Downbeat critics poll (as a "Rising Star" on alto saxophone) but he didn't have the money to buy a copy of the magazine. It was the kind of story you can't get out of your head because Mahanthappa's playing and ideas are so strong that any decent musical culture would have to embrace him.
Today, Mahanthappa has placed first or second in in that poll for many years running, going back to 2011, and he has been the Director of Jazz Studies at Princeton University since 2016. (Iyer, interestingly, plays a similar role at Harvard.) With two children and a house in Montclair, New Jersey, a lovely suburb of New York, he's a modern jazz success story. He has accomplished a great deal with a combination of immense talent, productivity, and no discernible artistic compromise.”