Did you ever get blowback from the other side, for not being black or brown enough for jazz?

RM: I have been in situations where I was made to feel not black enough. Not by people who mattered though; [saxophone greats] Von Freeman and Bunky Green saw me more like a cousin or the son they never had. But there were plenty of times with jam sessions on the South Side of Chicago where I was definitely made to feel like an outsider. That was surprising to me.

And there was always the assumption that I’d be an expert on Indian music from the white side of things. That got very old, and actually I feel like I would have gotten into Indian music earlier if I hadn’t had so much other bullshit attached to it. It made me feel it wasn’t safe to listen to the music. I didn’t feel like I could put an album on without feeling like I was an expert on what was happening. But I had to read the liner notes just like everybody else. That was definitely a drag.

VI: I have never experienced any kind of rejection on those terms. But it’s complicated: The history of this music has often been in terms of black and white. So it is partly just this idea of belonging—do you belong in this dynamic whatsoever? That’s been how we define ourselves and whether you fit. My music is always called “cerebral.” And that is a variation of what you are talking about; it is a way of saying I’m Asian, and therefore everything I do is brainy. It makes it seem like Coltrane’s music wasn’t cerebral. So it is sort of about how ethnicity ends up framing the way people perceive you.

From 1995 through 2008, you guys played a tremendous amount of music together. What part of that did you enjoy the most?

RM: We’re still trying to figure that out. [laughs] Somebody was asking about our relationship and I was like, “Sometimes the music seems secondary—it is like a byproduct of our friendship.”

VI: It is like family.

RM: When we first hung out, we talked about music but we were also joking about the way our parents mispronounced certain words. That stuff was as meaningful. And, I mean, traveling together right after 9/11? That was some heavy shit.

VI: Musically, the duo became a concentrated way of navigating all these things. Putting our aesthetic together, from all these disparate sources, figuring out how to interact with people and as players, and really just being able to make music on our own terms.

RM: We obviously have done a lot of great work together and gotten a lot of support as a pair. But there came a time where I wasn’t able to get gigs with my own band because the response from the promoter would be, “Well, you were just here with Vijay.” I don’t think that would have been the same if it had been any other race—I don’t someone in Branford Marsalis’ band would have had trouble coming back.

When there is an international festival, they’ll often list every musician’s nationality and they would often put “Indian” for both of us. We thought that was super-goofy, and that it promoted an exoticism that is totally inaccurate. That was a marginalization of sorts too.