Alto saxophonist, composer, and educator Rudresh Mahanthappa is one of the leading voices in 21st-century jazz, with over a dozen acclaimed albums. He was named "Alto Saxophonist of the Year" for nine of the last eleven years by DownBeat's International Critics’ Polls (2011-2013, 2015-2018, 2020-2021), and for five consecutive years by the Jazz Journalists Association (2009-2013) and again in 2016. He also won "Alto Saxophonist of the Year" in the 2015-2018 and 2020 JazzTimes Critics’ Polls and was named the Village Voice’s "Best Jazz Artist" in 2015. Mahanthappa has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. He currently serves as the Anthony H. P. Lee ’79 Director of Jazz at Princeton University.
Born in Trieste, Italy, to Indian émigrés in 1971 and raised in Boulder, Colorado, Mahanthappa studied at the University of North Texas, Berklee College of Music, DePaul University, and the Stanford Jazz Workshop before settling in Chicago. After moving to New York in 1997, he formed a quartet with pianist Vijay Iyer, releasing a sequence of albums: Black Water, Mother Tongue, and Codebook. The duo also subsequently collaborated as Raw Materials. Delving deeper into the Carnatic music of his parents' native southern India, Mahanthappa partnered with altoist Kadri Gopalnath and the Dakshina Ensemble for Kinsmen (2008). That same year, he debuted his Indo-Pak Coalition with Apti, featuring guitarist Rez Abbasi and Dan Weiss on tabla; their follow-up, Agrima (2017), expanded the trio’s sonic ambitions. In 2020, Mahanthappa released Hero Trio, an album honoring his musical heroes, which was a 2020 critic and fan favorite, followed by Animal Crossing (2022) with the same trio.
Mahanthappa has worked with Jack DeJohnette, Mark Dresser, Danilo Pérez, Arturo O’Farrill’s Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, the trios MSG and Mauger, the co-led quintet Dual Identity with Steve Lehman, and another with Bunky Green (Apex). His guitar-driven quartets on Samdhi and Gamak featured David Gilmore and Dave “Fuze” Fiuczynski, respectively. In 2015, he was commissioned by Ragamala Dance to create Song of the Jasmine for dancers and a hybrid jazz/South Indian ensemble, and by the PRISM Saxophone Quartet to compose “I Will Not Apologize for My Tone Tonight,” featured on Heritage/Evolution, Volume 1 (2015). Most recently, he was commissioned by the AACM’s Great Black Music Ensemble to compose “Finding Our Voice,” which premiered in 2021.
