Two sides of a cumulating icosahedron

It’s impossible to summarize, let alone list, guitarist Fareed Haque’s incredible range of achievements and interests. Haque, 53, is a cumulating icosahedron of a guitarist, with solid cred in the classical, jazz, rock, south Indian, Latin, grunge and electronic music worlds — and he’s adding more sides all the time.

Scramble onto YouTube and you’ll see him in his 20s, trading licks with Sting on clips from the legendary omnibus NBC series, “NightMusic.” He’s played Villa-Lobos concerti with the Chicago Philharmonic, toured with Latin legends like Arturo Sandoval and Danilo Perez, waxed three CDs as a leader for jazz’s premier label, Blue Note, toured with fusion pioneer Joe Zawinul, made two achingly beautiful acoustic discs of Balkan melodies with fellow guitarist Goran Ivanovic and on and on.

Haque's father is from Pakistan and his mother is from Chile. He grew up listening to Indian and Pakistani folk music, but never studied Indian music formally. At 16, he drove his dad’s Chrysler New Yorker from the northern suburbs to the south side of Chicago by himself and hung around in the clubs until 3 a.m. Chicago blues legend Eddie Johnson parked Haque in the corner and let him play along, but “not too loud.”

Haque juggles a wild variety of projects, from jam band Garaj Mahal to the multicultural Flat Earth Ensemble to straight-up classical gigs, but the blues joints of Chicago’s south side are still at the heart of his art. Last year, Haque made his Lansing JazzFest debut, playing in a trio with bassist Rodney Whitaker and drummer Randy Gelispie and joining a massive jam session with organist Jim Alfredson.

This year’s JazzFest crowd will see two more sides of Haque's cumulating icosahedron. At 9:30 p.m. Friday, Haque will trade licks with veteran B-3 organist Tony Monaco. At 11 p.m., he’ll hustle to another stage to showcase his latest project: MathGames, with a sound Haque calls “jazz-tronica,” centered on the “infinite sustain” of the Moog Guitar.

You’ve got your work cut out for you this year at JazzFest: two different groups in one night!

It’s easy for what I do to get pigeonholed. Depending on the group I bring, I hears things like, ‘Oh, he plays straight-ahead jazz’ (the Tony Monaco trio) or ‘That’s the guy that plays all that weird music’ (Mathgames).This year I get to do both. It’s going to be a tight squeeze. We’re going to finish on one stage and rush over to the second stage. I’ll be nice and warmed up for the second gig.

In the Tony Monaco trio, you’ll play with our own local legend, Randy Gelispie, on drums. I understand that one of your favorite old records is a 1969 trio date with Gelispie, Pat Martino and Gene Ludwig [recently re-issued on CD].

He’s a classic swinging jazz drummer. When you’re playing that music, you want to get close to the source, and it doesn’t get any closer than Randy. He’s the real deal. That’s where the joy is, in knowing that you’re embracing and living the tradition.

The organ trio came back in the 1980s and hasn’t faded in popularity since then.

Certain styles of music never go out of fashion. Whether it’s 250 years old, or 150 or 50, if the music’s right, you know it, because it doesn't go out of style. We’re finding we can do almost anything in this format. We share a lot of love for the tradition, but also for funk, and some of the more earthy forms of jazz.

Younger people dig the organ trio sound.

We just played the High Sierra Jam Band Music Festival. It’s all Grateful Dead and Phish fans. People were all over it. They got it. They were dancing in the aisles. (Keyboardist) Marco Benevento came and sat in with us. It was a very different scene, really fun. That energy translates to any audience.

Right now, everybody appreciates fully that the roots of the Motown sound, the Philadelphia sound, the roots of all this great funk music that has defined American music in the last 50 years, all came from jazz musicians. All the cats who were doing this music were jazz players. Realizing this intimate connection between jazz, funk, and dance music is a real essential element to understanding American music history.

We were surprised that our last record, “Furry Slippers,” made it to the top five in jazz, but it made it even higher on the roots and funk charts. The next album we have coming out — with myself and Tony and Steve Smith and special guests — it’s all boogaloo and funk grooves but still coming from the jazz tradition. That’s the key. A lot of kids are getting that connection intuitively.

You seem very comfortable mixing genres and styles while respecting the traditions they came from.

Somebody on Facebook was posting, ‘I hate labels.’ Well, that depends on how seriously you take them, I guess. Labels also identify traditions. Nowadays, you go into a high-end restaurant and you’ll find “Japanese fusion barbecue Mexican curry sauce” and everybody says, “Yummy.”

Younger folks don’t have an issue with this mixing of genres, but identifying your roots and tradition is essential. Bluegrass musicians bring a certain skill set. Identifying yourself as from that tradition is not limiting as much as accepting and honoring where you come from. Now that we’re in an age where you can put on the identity you want, it’s important for people to be honest about where their heart is, where their tradition is.

Do you have any inspirational figures in that respect?

Not to compare myself to a great artist, but Picasso is a great example to follow. He was well studied and well educated technically as an artist. And that gave him the freedom to explore what was interesting and important to him at the moment.

I’ve made a lot of decisions that were not wise for my career, but my objective has always been to focus on what’s important to me in my heart, and, at the same time, live a decent quality of life — nothing extravagant, but decent.

Over the years, I've had to do some gigs that were less than exciting to me, but I'm in a place now where I can direct where I put my energies. And not just selfishly, but kind of meaningfully.

Do you feel constrained in a traditional setting like the Tony Monaco trio?

It’s important for someone who is interested in modern music to be able to swing in a traditional style, to show that those connections are still vibrant. It’s fun to play with Tony, but I think it’s an important statement to make, both to students and to the community, that this is still a viable tradition, still alive, still cookin’.

The idea of being a guardian or curator already assumes that something is dead and ready to put into a museum. If we, the living exemplars of this tradition, put this shit in a museum, why should anyone else treat it any differently?

“Get a membership, go look at the statues, go look at these people playing this weird old-fashioned music.”

But you play a Villa-Lobos concerto or some other classical piece with a symphony orchestra. Some people might call that a museum gig.

It’s not a museum gig to me. I’m always bringing something alive to it. I’m not going to play the Villa-Lobos concerto the way it’s been played before. If it’s dead, it’s being embalmed to keep it from deteriorating. If it’s living, it’s growing and changing. I won’t play a piece if I can’t bring something new to it. There’s a lot of jazz in Villa-Lobos, and I don’t think a lot of classical guitarists get the jazz. They wouldn’t know where that is.

Villa-Lobos was a very spontaneous, improvisational composer. He wrote so much music. We’re just starting to realize how much. He was one of the most important composers of the 20th century, let alone just in Latin America.

I'm arranging some (pieces by legendary tango composer Astor) Piazzolla. Piazzolla improvised when he played his pieces. I can bring a lot to that because I can improvise. This is all music that is, to me, part of the living tradition. I feel very strongly about that. The moment you’re trying to control and maintain something with historical accuracy, you’re killing it. I’m completely against that approach.

Where does MathGames fit among your musical interests?

MathGames embraces electronica. Most musicians who embrace electronic music, DJs, aren’t schooled or skilled composers or instrumentalists — although that’s changing a lot, so I say that with caution. More complete musicians aren’t scared of technology, probably because it’s becoming more user friendly. You don’t have to be a computer geek, you can be a musician. MathGames started out as a showcase for the Moog guitar, an innovative instrument with a great sound, very unique.

It has some analog pickups that are designed to create an infinite sustain on the instrument. There are a lot of cool things you can do with that. I started writing music for that instrument. We tried using electronic drums and electric upright bass to fill out the sound of the group. It's a modern sound, but still trying to keep harmony and groove in there, because those are my roots. It’s real different. It’ll be interesting to contrast. You’ll hear.

How would you describe the difference between your approach in the (Tony) Monaco trio and MathGames?

In Tony’s trio, the organ is a big, powerful instrument and the guitar is the icing on the cake. In MathGames, the Moog (Guitar) is a big, powerful sound with a different kind of energy. It’s more earthy, more dubstep, more electronica and stuff. Definitely tuned to the electronic dance crowd. Look at the history of fusion and it’s clear that jazz musicians were reaching across the aisle to rock musicians. All through that was this thread of funk and groove and jazz.

For me, the important thing in MathGames is that we’ve got a bunch of guys who are interested in all kinds of music, but who can still play a boogaloo. Greg Fundis, the regular drummer in MathGames, is also the regular drummer in my trio with Tony — although Randy (Gelispie) will be playing with Tony at JazzFest. Even though [Fundis] goes all over the place and plays in a really successful jam band, he’s an old school cat.

That’s where the real excitement comes from. When old school cats who are bringing the tradition with them, who understand the subtleties that can’t be written down or notated, are looking at these electronic instruments without any trepidation. That’s opening the door for all kinds of new stuff.

You have an ambitious educational project in the works, right?

The new record Tony Monaco and I have coming out features legendary drummer Steve Smith. We made an educational video at the same time. We recorded an album that will be turned into a three-hour course that has nine cameras on a mixing board. The student can choose, in real time, what they want to watch. Steve’s right hand, left hand, left foot, right foot, Fareed’s right and left hands, Tony’s hands and feet, overall shots, etc.

Many things in these styles cannot be notated. In baroque music 200 years ago, you look at books and they say, “This note needs to be played with a little delay, a little sigh.” What does that mean?

Tony is the direct lineage of (organist) Jimmy Smith, and there’s so many things those B-3 players did that they kept secret. It was their shit!  You can’t write it down. It happens fast, in real time. You play this chord, you’re holding it, you hit this pedal, push this button, push this slide.

I think this will be a very historic document of how a master B-3 player deals with this instrument. We’ll take the actual recording and leave spots for the students to improvise in.

What else are you up to these days?

I'm forming a trio right now with the great Indian percussionist (V.) Selvaganesh, one of the top Indian multi-percussionists, and a great bassist from South America, Christian Galvez — an incredible composer and player. We write very similar music, and have an intuitive understanding with each other. We played together at (Chicago’s) Eye on India festival. It was such a groove. We hit it off immediately. I called my agent and said, “This will be the trio.” He said, “I can sell this.” We tour Europe in the spring.

It’s interesting. Galvez is Chilean and Ganesh is Indian. I'm half Indo-Pakistani and half Chilean, so I’m bridging the gap between these two continents.

The music will be very melodic, very virtuosic, but with the element of funk and groove that all three of us hold dear. That’s going to be what distinguishes this group from the other world-music-fusion-y groups out there.