If Kabir Dalawari hadn’t faced the music — literally — halfway through his pre-med studies in college, one of his neuroscience lectures might have convinced him to make the pivot.
When the drummer first enrolled at Loyola University, he tacked on a minor in music mostly at the behest of his high school teachers, who recognized his prodigious talent. The rest of his family in Palos Heights, where he grew up, worked in health care; Dalawari assumed he would do the same. But during that particularly rote neuroscience class, Dalawari couldn’t stop tapping out a 11/4 groove that seemed to have sewn itself through his own synapses.
Clearly, music wasn’t going anywhere. Dalawari dropped the pre-med track for a double major in cognitive science and jazz studies — a lonely road at a school with only a handful of jazz majors, but one that bought back scarce sleeping hours and allowed him to take composition lessons with bassist and Loyola faculty member Matt Ulery. Through his work with Ulery, Dalawari honed the composition chops that led to his debut album, “Awareness,” out March 25.
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“I wanted to do all original music for my senior recital because I’d been building a portfolio for about two years. And afterward, Matt was like, ‘OK, go record your music,'” Dalawari remembers with a laugh.
That he did. Gathering a slimmer group than the sextet that played his senior recital, “Awareness” features a quartet with Dalawari on kit, Ulery on bass, his Loyola classmate Eric Arroyo on piano and Kyle Brooks on alto saxophone. The same group reunites for a record release show at Constellation on March 24.
Now 23 and one year out of his undergraduate studies, Dalawari headlines Chicago’s premier avant-jazz spaces, which he frequented “almost nightly” back when he was too young to patronize 21+ clubs. Ulery, who’s played in Dalawari’s quartet at venues like Elastic Arts and Fulton Street Collective (which hosted Dalawari’s first outing as a bandleader, while he was still a student at Loyola), says that whenever the younger musician asks him to play a gig, he’s “going to say yes.”
“It’s rare to have that degree of professional collaboration with a former student. I’d say that’s rare even with someone coming from out of a music conservatory, not just out of a liberal arts school where a lot of the musicians aren’t music majors,” Ulery says. “It’s been great to see him finding his voice musically on drums and composition, and to see him getting out there as a bandleader. He’s definitely been one of the highlights of my teaching career.”
By sponging up Ulery’s tutelage and other musical influences, Dalawari devised an offbeat compositional approach that unites the otherwise varied tracks on “Awareness.” First, Dalawari plants himself behind the kit or the keyboard, depending on whether pitches or rhythm come to him first. If the former, he writes his harmonies before the melody, moseying through venturesome and sometimes tenuous chord relations. When Dalawari’s melodies finally emerge — like when the head floats to the surface nearly three minutes into the pointillistic “Expedition,” Dalawari’s first-ever composition, or when Brooks’s saxophone coheres into the tumbling motive driving “A Moment in Time” — they sound inevitable. Themes are tight and cellular, yet wide-open enough to springboard the quartet’s fanciful improvisations.
“For me, at least, chords dictate emotion: If I write the harmony first, I can play any melody notes over it. It forces me to hear things differently,” Dalawari says.
The title track is one of a couple of exceptions to the rule. “Awareness” begins with a tranquil, asymmetric melody right from the jump, played by Brooks. Urged on by Dalawari’s kit, the tune breaks into groovy little shimmies every several bars before returning to the same gently unspooling pace as before.
The muse that inspired “Awareness,” as well as the album’s cover art, was Dalawari’s younger brother, Amar. Autistic and nonverbal, Amar communicates with Dalawari and his family mostly through an electronic tablet.
“He loves to dance. He can’t play, but he loves it when I play music — sometimes when I’m practicing my mom sends him down, and he’s just vibing,” Dalawari says, grinning.
“To me, the album cover almost looks like water. That’s how I think about my brother, you know: He has this peaceful energy. It’s blue, the color for Autism Awareness Month, which is in April.”
Dalawari had hoped to release “Awareness” to coincide with World Autism Awareness Day on April 2. The timing didn’t align for the quartet’s Constellation booking, but Amar’s spirit still guides everything about the album.
“I was like, ‘Sorry, bro, we’re gonna be a week early,'” Dalawari jokes.
As for that early neuroscience lecture? It at least gave Dalawari a name for that loping, lopsided tune with the 11/4 groove: “Action Potential.”
“The action potential is a fundamental concept in neuroscience: It’s the electrical current that allows us to do anything we want to do, like move our hand,” he says. “On a graph, it looks like a steady line that’s moving up and down a little bit, then it spikes like crazy. It builds up, then lifts off.”
“Awareness” is available for pre-order on all streaming platforms and Dalawari’s website, kabirdalawari.com. The album release show is 8:30 p.m. March 24 at Constellation, 3111 N. Western Ave., tickets are $15 at songkick.com
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.
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