| Jazz |
Summary: Shirantha Beddage’s Departures blends contemporary jazz, hard bop and Sri Lankan musical traditions in a deeply personal exploration of identity, memory, loss and artistic discovery.
Shirantha Beddage’s Departures: Jazz, Cultural Heritage and the Art of Reinvention
Shirantha Beddage belongs to that category of musicians whose work invites us to listen beyond the obvious. A composer and baritone saxophonist, he possesses a distinctive sound, a sophisticated sense of musical architecture and, above all, the ability to make composition a vehicle for reflection. I had never encountered this Canadian musician before hearing the opening measures of “Musaladi Vannama (The Hare),” from his album Departures. What first caught my attention was the authority of his playing; what held it was the intelligence of a musical vision that refuses to separate formal ambition from the pleasure of listening. Rooted in hard bop yet unmistakably contemporary, Beddage’s jazz does not seek to revive the past as an object of nostalgia, nor does it confuse modernity with the restless pursuit of novelty. He draws on a rich musical inheritance without becoming captive to it, demonstrating that a tradition remains vital only when it is allowed to evolve.
The baritone saxophone is central to this vision. Its dark resonance, melodic flexibility and rhythmic weight offer Beddage a remarkable range of expressive possibilities, which he explores without reducing the instrument to its imposing physical presence. Like Céline Bonacina, who has developed a singular musical language around the baritone, he understands that technical command means little without a compelling artistic purpose. Their approaches differ, but both recognize the instrument’s capacity to move between strength and delicacy, authority and introspection. In Beddage’s hands, the baritone does more than assert itself. It shapes the musical argument, alters the balance between voices and creates room for the ensemble to breathe. There is a clear distinction here between complexity as a display of virtuosity and complexity as a means of expression. Beddage belongs firmly to the latter tradition. His modernity lies not in rejecting what came before, but in discovering how inherited musical forms can accommodate new experiences, ideas and emotions.
“Musaladi Vannama” offers an illuminating introduction to this approach. Beddage’s deep-toned saxophone engages in a subtle exchange with Kevin Turcotte’s trumpet, whose brighter, more distant-sounding phrases lend the music an almost dreamlike dimension. The contrast is not merely one of timbre. It creates a sense of space, as though the two instruments were approaching the same idea from different emotional and physical distances. Florian Hoefner’s piano, Jodi Proznick’s bass and Jim Doxas’ drums give the composition its structural coherence without constraining its movement. Harmonic tensions emerge and recede, rhythmic patterns shift, and the musicians continually adjust to one another. Yet the piece’s deepest appeal lies partly in what remains unspoken. Beneath the intricacy of the arrangement, there is an interior stillness, an opening through which the listener’s imagination can enter. The music trusts its audience to make discoveries rather than insisting on a predetermined response.
Such restraint is essential to Beddage’s conception of ensemble playing. The musicians do not compete for dominance or treat improvisation as an opportunity to demonstrate individual superiority. Their contributions acquire meaning through the relationships they establish with one another. At the same time, the music never becomes an exercise in compositional refinement detached from physical experience. Groove remains indispensable, giving the arrangements their forward motion and preventing harmonic sophistication from becoming an end in itself. This balance between discipline and spontaneity owes much to the way Departures was recorded. Beddage assembled musicians who had never played his compositions together, allowing the unfamiliarity of the encounter to become part of the creative process. With limited rehearsal and minimal editing, the performances preserve the tension that arises when musicians must listen attentively, respond instinctively and establish a collective language as they play. The result is neither a carefully polished illusion of spontaneity nor an indiscriminate celebration of improvisation. It is a meeting between a clear compositional vision and the unpredictable intelligence of musicians working together in real time. Beddage understands that a score, however carefully conceived, must leave room for experience if it is to become more than an arrangement of notes.
The album’s title, Departures, gives this musical philosophy its broader significance. The word evokes travel, but also loss, transition and the possibility of renewal. The compositions draw on defining experiences in Beddage’s recent life, including the death of his mother, a professional transition and numerous family journeys. Each has altered his relationship with familiar surroundings and with time itself. Grief leaves an absence that cannot be repaired. Professional change unsettles established routines and opens a period of uncertainty. Travel separates us from the places and people we know, placing us temporarily between what we have left behind and what we have yet to encounter. These experiences differ in their circumstances, but each requires a reconsideration of identity, belonging and the fragile structures through which we organize our lives.
Beddage does not attempt to translate these events into literal musical narratives. He is interested instead in their emotional consequences: the tension between movement and hesitation, the impulse to move forward and the desire to remain attached to what has been lost. This distinction allows Departures to transcend autobiography. The listener need not know the private circumstances that inspired a composition to recognize its emotional truth. Melodic fragments, changes in rhythmic intensity and the interplay of instrumental colors become ways of approaching experiences that resist straightforward explanation. Travel is particularly revealing in this respect. Anyone who has waited through the suspended hours of an airport, watched the landscape disappear beneath an airplane wing or felt the peculiar dislocation of leaving one place without yet belonging to another will recognize the album’s emotional geography. Departure creates an interval in which the past remains present while the future has yet to acquire a definite shape.
Yet the experience of movement is not as universal as contemporary culture often suggests. The freedom to cross borders, discover other societies and move between countries remains profoundly unequal. Travel can broaden perspectives, but it can also expose prejudices that persist beneath the language of cosmopolitanism and cultural openness. Beddage does not turn these contradictions into an explicit political argument. Instead, they form part of the human landscape through which his music moves, from contemplation to urgency, from melancholy to humor, without imposing a single interpretation. Departures is not an uncomplicated celebration of mobility. It is concerned with what movement reveals about us, the attachments it tests, the assumptions it unsettles and the possibilities it opens. In this sense, departure becomes more than a physical act. It is a condition of modern life, an encounter with uncertainty that can be painful, liberating or both at once.
That search for meaning acquires a more intimate dimension when Beddage explores his Sri Lankan heritage. A Canadian musician living in the United States, he stands at the intersection of several cultural histories, including South Asian, British and European influences. Such a background raises questions that extend well beyond the personal. How does an artist inhabit several traditions without turning them into a collection of recognizable cultural references? How can inherited music be transformed without losing the history that gives it meaning? These questions are particularly relevant in a global musical environment in which cultural influences circulate rapidly and can easily be detached from their original contexts. Beddage’s response is not to construct an artificial synthesis, but to engage with his inheritance as something living and capable of change.
“Musaladi Vannama” and “Ukusa Vannama” draw on the vannamas, a collection of 18 traditional Sri Lankan compositions associated with the court culture of the Kandyan kings. Beddage encountered “Ukusa Vannama” during a residency at the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka in 2022, where he also reconnected with his great-uncle Rohana Baddage, a singer, actor and teacher of traditional music. The encounter lends his exploration a significance that cannot be reduced to the discovery of an unfamiliar repertoire. Traditions survive through people, family relationships and acts of transmission as much as through the music itself. They are shaped by the circumstances in which they are performed, the memories attached to them and the changing lives of those who inherit them. For Beddage, returning to this musical heritage does not mean attempting to recover an untouched past. It means confronting the distance between the world in which these compositions originated and the life he inhabits today, then asking what can emerge from the encounter.
The answer lies in the music’s refusal to treat cultural difference as either an obstacle or a decorative resource. In “Musaladi Vannama,” the Sri Lankan melody becomes a point of departure for a dialogue with hard bop and contemporary improvisation. The original material is neither presented as an exotic curiosity nor reproduced as an exercise in historical fidelity. Instead, it enters a new musical environment in which its identity remains audible while its possibilities expand. This is a delicate undertaking. Genuine cultural exchange requires more than combining contrasting sounds; it demands attention to context, an understanding of what is being inherited and a willingness to preserve differences rather than dissolve them into a generic international style. Beddage’s approach is compelling precisely because it allows the encounter to remain open-ended.
Jazz itself offers a complex historical framework for this inquiry. Born within African American communities, it developed through particular social and cultural circumstances before traveling across national boundaries and becoming a global language. Its international reach has produced extraordinary artistic exchanges, but it has also raised enduring questions about appropriation, ownership and the unequal circulation of cultural influence. Beddage’s engagement with Sri Lankan music belongs to this larger history of transmission. His work does not suggest that every tradition can be combined without friction, or that cultural differences become irrelevant once musicians begin to improvise. It proposes something more nuanced: that new music can emerge from the encounter between distinct histories when curiosity is accompanied by knowledge and a willingness to listen.
Another important thread in Departures is the influence of Kenny Wheeler, the British-born trumpeter and composer who became one of the defining figures in Canadian jazz. Wheeler developed a remarkably individual language, characterized by harmonic richness, melodic subtlety and a lyrical sensibility that never excluded formal complexity. His work continues to pose a fundamental question for musicians who follow him: how does one inherit an artistic language without merely reproducing its surface? For Beddage, Wheeler represents not simply an aesthetic model but a way of thinking about composition, a reminder that originality can emerge from a sustained engagement with the work of others. “Circling,” originally conceived for large ensemble and premiered in 2025 at a symposium devoted to Wheeler, gives this relationship a concrete form. Returning to a revered composer is not an act of preservation alone. It is an opportunity to discover what remains unfinished, what can be reconsidered and what new directions an existing body of work might suggest. The most meaningful tribute is not imitation, but continuation.
That principle helps explain the album’s remarkable range of moods. “The Pickled Herring Blues,” inspired by a culinary experience in Sweden, moves into a playful, funk-driven territory that gives the musicians considerable freedom. Its title may seem deliberately incongruous beside the album’s more reflective concerns, but the contrast is revealing. Artistic creation does not depend exclusively on grief, cultural identity or the weight of historical inheritance. It can begin with an ordinary encounter, a meal or a passing incident that unexpectedly captures the imagination. Humor and lightness are not distractions from serious artistic thought; they are part of the experience of being alive. By making room for them, Beddage avoids the trap of treating emotional depth as synonymous with solemnity.
“Hey, Jimmy!” moves in a different direction. The composition draws on a racist encounter Beddage experienced during a family trip to Ireland while also invoking the musical world of saxophonist and composer Jimmy Giuffre. The experience exposes the limits of the comforting assumption that travel necessarily makes people more tolerant or that cultural prejudice belongs to a less enlightened past. Movement can broaden the mind, but it cannot guarantee openness, and the language of international understanding often conceals the persistence of exclusion. Beddage does not reduce the incident to a statement or an autobiographical explanation. He transforms it into music, allowing a personal experience to enter a broader space of reflection. Such transformation does not erase the original offense or diminish its consequences. It changes the terms through which the experience can be encountered, inviting the listener to consider the distance between the ideals of cultural openness and the realities of prejudice.
Vernon Duke’s “Autumn in New York” adds another perspective on belonging. New York emerges as a place of extraordinary attraction and relentless intensity, a city whose energy can inspire as readily as it can overwhelm. The familiar standard acquires fresh meaning through interpretation, demonstrating that a musical work does not remain alive simply because it is repeatedly performed. It survives because each new reading reveals something that was not fully apparent before. Between Sri Lankan traditional music, Wheeler’s compositional legacy and the American jazz repertoire, Beddage establishes a dialogue among different musical histories without pretending that they share a single origin or can be reduced to one style. The coherence of Departures comes not from erasing these distinctions, but from the intelligence with which he brings them together.
What stays with me most is Beddage’s ability to make these diverse experiences part of a unified musical vision without sacrificing either compositional rigor or the immediate pleasure of listening. His baritone saxophone has unmistakable authority, but he never allows that authority to become a form of domination. His writing is sophisticated without becoming self-indulgent, and its complexity remains inseparable from melody, rhythmic vitality and emotional expression. His exploration of Sri Lankan music is neither a sentimental return to origins nor an attempt to manufacture a hybrid identity for contemporary audiences. It is an inquiry into how inherited traditions can remain meaningful when they encounter different histories and ways of life. His relationship with Wheeler and the jazz standards similarly demonstrates that tradition becomes sterile when treated as an untouchable model, but fertile when approached as an invitation to continue the work of creation.
At a time when musical innovation is often measured by novelty alone, and when the accelerated consumption of new releases can leave little room for sustained attention, Departures offers a persuasive alternative. Beddage trusts the listener to engage with the music on its own terms. He does not force its meanings into the foreground or confuse complexity with obscurity. Instead, he allows the compositions to reveal their relationships gradually, rewarding the kind of attention that contemporary listening habits increasingly make difficult. This is not music that demands admiration for its technical accomplishments alone. Its achievement lies in making those accomplishments serve a larger purpose: the transformation of personal experience into a language that others can inhabit.
Departures is neither a manifesto nor an autobiography set to music. It is an exploration of what happens when grief, travel, cultural inheritance and unexpected encounters become material for artistic thought. Its unity comes from jazz itself, a tradition whose enduring strength lies in its capacity to absorb experience without surrendering the individuality of the musicians who shape it. I had never encountered Shirantha Beddage before listening to this album, but the discovery reminded me why encountering an unfamiliar artist can be so rewarding. There is a particular satisfaction in finding a musician who does not simply reproduce what already exists, but seeks to give a distinctive form to what he has lived, learned and come to understand. Perhaps Beddage’s deepest allegiance is not to a single country or cultural origin, but to a way of inhabiting music: allowing different inheritances to speak to one another and turning departures into possibilities. We never begin entirely from nothing; every artist carries traces of the people, places and sounds that preceded them. The challenge is to transform those traces into something that belongs to no one else. With Departures, Beddage demonstrates that jazz remains one of the most compelling languages for such an undertaking, a music in which the willingness to leave familiar ground can become the beginning of genuine discovery.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, October 9th, 2026
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To buy this album (October 16, 2026)
Musicians :
Shirantha Beddage – Baritone Saxophone
Kevin Turcotte – Trumpet (1, 2), Flugelhorn (4)
Florian Hoefner – Piano
Jodi Proznick – Bass
Track Listing :
Musaladi Vannama (The Hare)
Hey, Jimmy!
Ukusa Vannama (The Hawk)
Circling
Departures
The Pickled Herring Blues
Autumn In New York