I think the most common misperception comes from people who actually haven't listened to much of it. At this point, in terms of recordings, there's about 15 hours worth you can check out [laughs]. So, the most common misperception is that you can say anything about it in one sentence. I've made a point to try to cover a lot of ground and have pushed myself on all these different fronts, from collaborations to just challenging myself.

Sometimes people will say "his music is complex and mathematical." Other times people will say, "His stuff is fusing Indian music and jazz" or they'll say "he's a sell out!" [laughter] because he played a Michael Jackson song, he must be a sell out. Not to self-aggrandize, but it's kind of like "Blind Man and the Elephant" -- you're looking at one side and not really getting the full scope. It's hard to do that to any artist who has been around for any length of time. For instance, this morning I was asked to put together a playlist of music by Wadada Leo Smith, a trumpet player who I've worked with for several years. I've been going through his catalog and it's vast! I mean, how do I choose five tracks from this guy? [laughs] There's 50 hours of music here! So, you really can't encapsulate anyone. Every person is large and contains multitudes, right? So, to answer that question: we're all complex human beings.

Thank you for saying that. It's not even that I would know how to go about doing that on purpose. [laughs] One of the most profound aspects of that album, Money Jungle, is that you really hear not just music, but action. You really hear music as a result of human action. And you feel like you hear choices being made. You hear conversations being had. You hear conflict. You hear resolution. You hear life -- not just pretty tunes or melodies or chords. It's about what sits behind it and makes it possible.

Yeah. It's basically about the storytelling aspect of the music. Which has always been the point -- especially in this area of music, probably with music in general -- it's always been about something deeper than music. It's like I said, I thank you for the compliment, but I don't know how to answer that in terms of "how did I do that" or "did I do that."

I think about people and histories and communities and storytelling. For all the supposed mathematical structure there is to my music and stuff, for me, it's really about that -- it's about people, action and life. All the structure is just a means to set that stuff in motion. That's how I connect with that. It's a beautiful piece of music. It has a majesty to it, that I adore, but it also… somehow there's a trace of embodiment in it. When Duke plays you feel like you're hearing his hands at work. Even the way all of them navigate through that piece, it's like they're placing their hands on the music. You hear all those throbbing little sounds Mingus makes on the high register of the bass -- it's warbling, almost like a cry or a bird call or something, but it can also feel like it's the result of fingers on the instrument. And Max is playing mallets on the toms. He's not playing time; he's playing events, gestures, that mark the music with his presence. That's what I think about as an improviser in general -- not that you can play some burning bebop line, but can you impose your presence on the music.

Sorry. [laughter]

Well, you know, it's what we make of it -- "we" being the community of people that care about it. I don't think of it as a style even. I think of it as a community of people who are invested in it. And I also think of it as a body of knowledge. You can say it's a history of ideas, and also, a history of actions. I think part of what's happened is that its reason for existing has transformed in terms of who's involved and why. It used to be this upstart music from a marginal, ethnic community in the United States that was experiencing some of the most dire forms of oppression. In a way, the music through history has told that story of oppression and the fight against it and the transcendence beyond it. The fact that people were able to dream up these incredible means of expression in spite of that. When I hear Monk and Bird and that stuff, that's music that emerged out of the most impossible conditions. It's like music that shouldn't even exist really, considering the intensity to dream it into being is astounding.

When I hear the choices people make today to enter this music, it's not at that level of risk or impossibility. Especially because most people entering this music are going to a school or a conservatory for it and paying $50-60,000 a year to study it. It's selecting from a different sector of society, so I think what you hear in the music, or at least a generation's worth of music, it's coming from a place of relative privilege. So, it doesn't quite have the same dynamic [laughs]. That's not to say that the music shouldn't exist from those sets of circumstances, but if you go back to the storytelling qualities of it, what are the stories being told now and why? That's just something that's been on my mind: who is making this music and why nowadays? When I hear something these days, that's what I think: that's pretty. Or that's intense. Or that's virtuosic. But how did it get here, and what was its trajectory from inception to execution, and how did it reach my ears exactly?

In my case, it's not like I grew up oppressed or had anything denied to me in my life. I had a very fortunate circumstance. But I also would say that the point in time when I chose to be an artist, it sort of felt in its own small way impossible, like I was dealing with a certain condition of impossibility, or at least unprecedented-ness in the early to mid-90s before anyone really had encountered an Indian-American musician of any kind. There are historical reasons for that -- why there was nobody like me, before me. And that's because in the 1960s the immigration laws changed in the U.S. that made it possible for people like my parents to come here -- before it basically wasn't allowed. So, people of my generation, people born from that wave of immigrants after 1965, were the first Indian-Americans. There was a condition of newness and improvisation and just becoming a person and becoming American and becoming of age in this culture and participate in it as something more than a marginal observer [laughs]. That's kind of the back story of what animates me as an artist, not that that's the whole story, but just the fact that this hasn't happened before made it an intense proposition. I didn't really know whether it was going to work. Just recently it began to take hold, and I'm 39 now [laughs]. So, there's that aspect to it, which is nothing like being descended from slaves -- nothing like that. But what I would say is that, for myself, when I was coming of age as an artist, the clearest points of reference for me in terms of how do you do this when it's basically never been done, were the people from this area of music. From people that faced a much more intense version of that question.