THE TIME IS NOW

An outburst of saxophone flurries sits you straight up in your chair. The tone is rich but with a cutting edge.

It has to be Rudresh Mahanthappa. The riveting cry of his alto saxophone is one of the most recognizable sounds in jazz.

But those darting runs coalesce into Charlie Parker’s “Red Cross.” So it can’t be Mahanthappa, can it? He has made 15 straight albums of original music. He doesn’t do covers, right?

On his 16th recording, Hero Trio, Mahanthappa breaks through to the past—his and ours. He proudly proclaims Parker’s bebop—but then “Red Cross” flies apart, into free showers of 16th notes. It is startling to hear Mahanthappa playing songs you know, even lilting ones like Stevie Wonder’s “Overjoyed” and time-honored standards like “I Can’t Get Started.” Of course, his versions do not stay lilting or standard for long. By the sixth track, you’re ready for anything—except “Ring of Fire.” Rudresh Mahanthappa doing a Johnny Cash song? There must be a story there.

The story begins in Colorado—specifically, Boulder. Mahanthappa’s father is a noted theoretical physicist who came to the United States from India to get a Ph.D. at Harvard and stayed in the American academic world, settling at the University of Colorado. The school’s website says that K. T. Mahanthappa is “interested in grand unification theories, fermion mixing and masses including charge fermions and neutrinos.” His son Rudresh shares a proclivity for the intellectually challenging and the arcane, but in 16th notes, not neutrinos. (There are two more sons in this high-achieving family, both with Ph.D.s in the sciences.)

Mahanthappa grew up in Boulder, listening