DON’T BE MEAN TO PEOPLE

Friday, Oct. 19 (6 p.m.) & Saturday, Oct. 20 (1 p.m.), $20–$150

Ponysaurus Brewing, Durham

www.ponysaurusbrewing.com/dontbemean

Hailed as the successor to Jimi Hendrix, Bill Frissell, and even J Dilla, Rafiq Bhatia might be the jazz world’s best-kept secret. He creates music with an eye for technical experimentation and a head for generous collaboration; consistent across his music is what he calls an “otherworldly potential.” His guitar always grounds his songs like a scale on a map, even as he tesselates rhythms that reverberate and expand across a sonic landscape.

Having recently released Breaking English, his first self-produced album and his third solo project, earlier this year, Bhatia will headline the Friday night portion of the Don’t Be Mean to People benefit at Ponysaurus Brewing Company in Durham. The two-day benefit, now in its second year, raises money for the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina. For Bhatia, who grew up in Raleigh and graduated from Enloe High School, the concert occasions not only an opportunity for fundraising for a meaningful cause, but also a return to his home state that he left over a decade ago.

Enloe

Where do I even start? It’s like a wave of memories washing over me. What a tremendous privilege it was to be at that high school at that time. The peers I had inspired me to think differently about the world around me and about myself and who I was even. Also, Enloe is where I met Jack Hill, who is one of my best friends who will be playing bass with me at the ACLU benefit. The nerds there were the cool kids. I was definitely a nerd. But, let me be clear, I was not one of the cool nerds.

Simulacrum

The first thing I think about is Chris Pattishall, who is also from North Carolina! Chris is known in New York as this sort of erudite, straight-ahead jazz pianist. But everything that he’s interested in outside of music—his taste tends to be very avant-garde and surrealist—the opposite of what people know him for. He gave me Roberto Bolano’s Antwerp to read, and talked to me about simulacra.

We were across the street from a place where we were going to play a show, a bar at this Korean BBQ restaurant. And there was a simulacrum in the bar! It’s a fish tank that is built into the bar that has some kind of—I don’t know what you would call the little things that go into fish tanks or terrariums, the coral. But then there are no actual fish in the fish tank. Instead, behind the fish tank, there is a screen with, like, a screensaver of fish swimming around. So you can see the water and what’s actually in the tank, but behind that there’s a projection of fish.

Anyways, every time I tried to read Antwerp, I would get busy with other work and struggle to come back to it. So [Chris] is really mad at me that I still haven’t finished it.

Alien

When I think about the term alien, there are two versions of it that come to mind. One is the extraterrestrial variety. There is something real and tangible about the music I want to make—it might exist somewhere else. Even when electronic, it has an organic quality. It has more of an otherworldly potential than a digital potential.

The second version of alien is in terms of the sense of borders and the mobility of people and otherness. Right now, I’m touring across Europe. And I’m both somebody who has an easy time at borders and a difficult time at borders, as a U.S. citizen and as someone who was raised Muslim. It’s so interesting to see how arbitrary our notions of mobility are. I’m interested in this whole concept of where we allow people to come from, and what we think of them upon arrival.

Lightworks

Oh my god, [J Dilla] is just the best ever. Dilla sort of revolutionized the way that drummers play in my generation. There’s a rhythmic tension in the way that people play when they play music in an analog way that can be exaggerated by juxtaposing it against the opposite, which is a more computerized, robotic delineation of time. You know when you hear someone playing a beat that sort of wilts back or feels sluggish or woozy—the thing that contextualizes that element in Dilla’s work is that there’s always another element that’s right exactly where the beat is, so the laziness and swagger of it is always made more salient by juxtaposing it against its opposite.

That’s something that I’m constantly looking for ways to do in every area of music: finding a way to contextualize sounds and rhythms and ideas that can turn something familiar on its head, or make something totally foreign feel very kind of intimately familiar. I think of that William Blake quote “Without contraries is no progression.” And I’m pretty sure I learned that quote at Enloe High School.

Resistance

My album, Breaking English, is called that because I went with my family to India. We were in a car driving to see the Taj Mahal and kept seeing billboards for “shooting ranges.” We were confused, but then my dad and I realized it wasn’t advertising guns, it was advertising scenic overlooks, to take good pictures. My dad said, “At a certain point, more people outside the West will be using English than inside of it.” You can allow yourselves to be defined by other people’s stereotypes about you or you can represent yourself in a way that stands in opposition to that.

When I was at Enloe, and I was really into music, there was nobody that I knew of that looked like me that was making music that I was listening to. There was also nobody that looked like me on TV, in advertisements, in any type of entertainment. There was no representation, except for one critical representation: terrorism on TV.

For me, deciding to become a musician was not a logical path, and it was not one that I seriously considered as an alternative for many years. And even when I did, I had this ongoing imposter syndrome. Now, every time I play a show, or I appear somewhere in my capacity as an artist, and I see some young brown girls or guys hanging out in the audience, seeing that I’m doing this, they don’t even have to like the music, just the fact that I’m here doing this is part of the reason that I’m here doing it.