Tell-tale Tull
Ian Scot Anderson and company haven’t lost their touch – not even after 40 long years. Jethro Tull is vintage wine.

There’s something old boy Ian – he’s 61, is that old? – must remember: that playing Indian and western side by side on stage doesn’t mean it has fused. And that, truth be told, even from the hated critic’s point of view (and anyone who pays can criticise), the tie-up with Anoushka Shankar a week ago, in Kolkata, didn’t really work. Of the Piper and the Princess, as the concert was called, well, the piper prevailed, flute, guitar, tambourine and all.

But the important thing is that Jethro Tull presided. A bespectacled Anderson at 61 is still Ian Anderson, Tull still Jethro Tull, the magic still intact, in fact now vintage, it’s tasting a rare pleasure, and a privilege. The staccato, scratchy sweetness of the steel flute wafting across from the Scottish highlands is almost a picture complete in itself; for the listener from a totally different musical milieu that finds its roots in this sub-continent, it’s like listening to a Braveheart in love, his mosaic beautiful. “…Laughed down by the putting green / I popped down in their holes / Four and twenty labourers were labouring / Digging up their gold…” he goes in their classic Mother Goose. As one gentleman at the show says about Anderson: “He’s Mick Jagger with a flute”. So true. At Kolkata, it was all there, put out to perfection, numbers such as Heavy Horses, Aqualung, Too old to Rock n Roll: Too Young to Die, Mother Goose, Locomotive Breath…

Tull is a major milestone in the journey that rock music has travelled, from the father of Rock ‘n’ Roll, the venerated Charles Edward Anderson “Chuck” Berry (b 1926, the man still gigs) through to its king Elvis (b 1935, d 1977) to what it is now. With Tull, that spectrum of the extraordinary is only broadened, with generous helpings of Scottish and British folk. Add to that the hard drums and the keyboard, the Electric Blues lick, the crazy flute, the dense lines, and the brain and the mind are taken as well. Example:

The old rocker wore his hair too long / wore his trouser cuffs too tight / unfashionable to the end – drank his ale too light / death’s head belt buckle – yesterday’s dreams – the transport caf’ prophet of doom / ringing no change in his double-sewn seams / in his post-war-babe gloom… That’s their Too Old to Rock n Roll: Too Young to Die classic. And so come the crowds, both young and old, many to listen to what was and still is, and so many to just find out what is, and, more importantly, could be. According to Levon Helm, drummer of The Band, the group that once played with Bob Dylan, there came a time when all kinds of music mixed, Bluegrass, Country, Blues… And what did they call it, asks the interviewer in the 1978 Martin Scorsese film “The Last Waltz”, the celluloid recording of The Band’s last concert together. “Rock n Roll,” says Helm. With bands such as Jethro Tull, apart from the genre getting more pleasantly complex and hard, Anderson’s repertoire perhaps does what many failed to do: take forward the great Rock movement even while staying distinctly apart in sound, and often thought.

And, of course, versatility has its virtues. For some unexplained reason there seems to be a tradition of being the multitasking rocker among the maestros of the school. Anderson plays guitar, flute, mouth organ, his bassist also plays the xylophone, the keyboard man plays the accordion and piccolo…

The multitasking helps perfect the flavour of the western sound.

Which would bring one back to the fusion which is what Tull is all about, the only difference being by way of the continents that are involved perhaps. Tea with Anoushka as he calls the first piece with the lady, however, wasn’t so refreshing. There are classics such as Ravi Shankar and Yehudi Menuhin’s East Meets West endeavour in the early days; and yet there are some who prefer what violinist L Subramanian attained with Stephane Grappeli and their Conversations to the East Meets West endeavour. And Anderson is so aware of it: “It’s a tricky musical situation,” he recently told a paper. “The sitar is played in a single key; you have to be really careful about chordal changes in a backdrop that features a rock band.” At the Kolkata concert, every piece that had an overwhelming theme, be it Indian or western, but had its elements accentuated with those of the other, made the mark. The others didn’t seem to: Anderson’s composition Celtic Cradle, for example, wasn’t as pleasing to the ear as their version of Johan Sebastian Bach’s Bouree. Then again, that is perhaps the frontier that maestros will eventually have to fight in, taking their battle beyond the faultlines of inter-continental culture. But come to Tull’s “Locomotive Breath”, where Anoushka and her tabla player and flautist do solos, and they are all in their elements: it’s a whole new feel, the best accentuated with the best.

That’s rock and what Jethro Tull does with it: magic. If Dylan’s Pulitzer citation credits him with bringing rock music from the streets to the lecture hall, Jethro Tull is still the Bohemian, out on the streets and the fields. No confines. Yet cerebral. Now, would an old rocker like Anderson like his music being called that?

Pranab Bora