Often insufficiently translated as “scale” or “mode,” raga is a complex conceptual framework used to understand and create melodic coherence in many types of Indian music. An alapana is an unmetered, free improvisation that is melodically structured by one particular raga. In conventional Karnatak performance, a violin player will often accompany a vocalist during an alapana by echoing what the vocalist sings. However, rather than simply repeating the vocalist’s lines, the specific way the violinist’s body has been musically trained (i.e., fingerings, hand positions, bowing patterns, etc.) will always produce slight differences. I responded to M.S. in much the same way while also following the methodology in my response to Ornette, listening to her ālāpana many, many times, and then trying to copy exactly what she was singing while listening to her in real time.

The result is naturally very different from To Ornette. I spent eighteen years being trained in Karnāṭak voice. I haven’t been “trained” in free jazz (no one has, at least not in the same way). So my initial response to M.S. was much closer, technically, to M.S.’s performance itself. After that initial response, my decision to accompany myself in the way a violinist accompanies a singer on stage produced the same kinds of slight, but crucial, differences. Rather than creating a delay, I created “altered echoes” of my own voice. That alteration could have infinite versions. The alterity that emerges from my response to M.S. does not appear in sweeping gestures of radical change, but as infinite slight variations from the same, allowing a fluid form of identity to repeatedly re-establish and re-dissolve into itself.