Published

31-10-2026

Type of Work

Conference Presentation

Abstract

Jazz and Carnatic music have constituted one of the more surprising entanglements in global improvisatory practice. While these two traditions have fundamentally different theoretical and aesthetic bases, they are perhaps uniquely situated for intercultural dialogue, both relying at higher levels of performance on intensely focused interactions and reactions. For the last twenty years, I have been attracted by the similarities and the differences, and the implications of creating music in the border zone.

This paper examines intercultural music-making through an analysis of Songs for Dead Sailors (2025), a song cycle that functions as a site of my sustained entanglement with Carnatic music over twenty years of practice and study. While my doctoral research explored appropriation and intercultural practice, this paper asks what happens when a Western jazz practitioner absorbs a non-Western musical tradition over years of sustained, embodied engagement. The result is not syncretism in any tidy sense, but a personal response to influence–bricolage in the musical-philosophical sense, in which disparate materials are assembled into a coherent but irreducibly composite practice.

Through an analysis of elements of the work—melodic vocabulary, rhythm, ornamentation, phrasing–this paper makes a larger argument about the formation of personal musical style as an act of embodied, cross-cultural knowledge-making. In doing so, it contributes to an emerging body of practice-led research into how musicians entangle with traditions not their own, and what those entanglements produce.

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Citation

Wren, T. (2026, October 31). Carnatic entanglements: Influences of South Indian classical music in Songs for Dead Sailors [Conference presentation]. 9th Australasian Jazz and Improvisation Research Network (AJIRN 9) Conference, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Sydney, NSW, Australia.

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