Rudresh Mahanthappa Courtesy of Pi Recordings
Eventually, nearly every man comes to believe that he's turning into his father. For alto saxophonist and composer Rudresh Mahanthappa, a pioneering figure on the avant-garde jazz scene, the sneaking suspicion arrived early.
In 1980, when Rudresh was a fifth grader, a schoolmate brought an article into current affairs class announcing the discovery of plasma in Saturn's rings by the Voyager I space probe. The teacher was agog: Who knew there was blood in outer space?
"I was the kid who stood up and said, 'No, plasma is when electrons and protons are disjointed, and orbiting each other,'" Rudresh recalled. "That was my dad speaking."
Rudresh's father is K.T. Mahanthappa, a theoretical particle physicist at the University of Colorado, Boulder whose interests include neutrinos, superstrings, and grand unification theories that seek to unify the fundamental physical forces in the universe.
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Around the house, K.T. enjoyed discussing lighter topics with his three boys, such as why the Earth goes around the sun. He was the kind of father who thought nothing of driving 70 miles to find a knot theorist who could help young Rudresh complete a 9th-grade science fair project on Mobius strip variants. The Mahanthappa boys—Rudresh, his older brother Nagesh and younger brother Mahesh—dominated the local science fair circuit: Both Nagesh—who is currently a neuroscientist at a biotech firm in Cambridge, Mass.—and Mahesh qualified for the Westinghouse International Science and Engineering Fair, now sponsored by Intel. Mahesh, now a professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, won it.
Long fascinated by mathematics and cryptography, Rudresh was addicted to Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American, and was forever devising codes to use with his neighborhood friends. For many years, he saw himself becoming a mathematician or a computer programmer or a businessman—someone who made his living with numbers rather than words.
Even today, mathematics is constantly on his mind: "It's funny how much I think about math on a daily basis," he said.
Nonetheless, by the end of high school, Rudresh had concluded that he lacked the patience to pursue the kinds of increasingly sophisticated problems that interested him. Rudresh was stuck on a difficult tiling problem involving the most efficient arrangement of pentominoes (shapes composed of five contiguous squares, similar to the four-square tetrominoes of Tetris) for yet another science fair, and faced with the prospect of having to learn the computer programming language Pascal in order to write an algorithm to solve it, when he began to consider other career options.
"That's when I started to become much more interested in saxophone," he said. "Do I want to try to learn this Charlie Parker solo, or do I want to learn Pascal? For me, it was a no-brainer."
For K.T. Mahanthappa, the choice was less obvious.
"I was concerned about him making a living," K.T. said. "I even told him, 'Rudresh, you can be a third-rate physicist and still make a living, but if you're a third-rate musician, you won't be able to.'"
In a last-ditch effort to highlight the risks of a career in the arts, K.T. sent Rudresh to a summer program at Boston's Berklee College of Music, hoping that his son would be discouraged by the strength of the competition.
"It completely backfired," said K.T. "He was one of the best students there."
Rudresh had been playing recorder and clarinet since grade school, but it wasn't until he encountered works by mathematically oriented composers like Bela Bartok and Arnold Schoenberg in college that he realized he wouldn't have to leave numbers behind.
"I felt like I could bridge whatever abilities I had as a musician with whatever I was doing all the time in my mind with numbers," he said.