Mantel Takes Up Betrayal, Beheadings In 'Bodies.'

November 26, 2012

Guest: Hilary Mantel

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. I hope you had a good thanksgiving, and I hope you've had ample time to digest your holiday meals because we're going to talk about beheadings during the time of King Henry VIII in 16th-century England. My guest, Hilary Mantel is the author of the bestselling novel "Wolf Hall," which ends with the beheading of his counselor Lord Chancellor Thomas More after More opposed Henry's decision to break from the Roman Catholic Church so he could divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon, and marry Anne Boleyn.

It didn't work out so well for Boleyn. Her beheading provides the ending to Mantel's bestselling sequel "Bring Up the Bodies." Both books are told from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell, Henry's chief minister. Mantel's third volume will end with Cromwell's execution. "Wolf Hall" and "Bring Up the Bodies" each won Britain's most prestigious literary aware, the Man Booker Prize. "Wolf Hall" also won America's National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Mantel lives in England.

Hilary Mantel, welcome to FRESH AIR, and congratulations on your second Man Booker Prize. It's quite an accomplishment.

HILARY MANTEL: Thank you.

GROSS: So I've love to start from a reading - with a reading from the new book, "Bring Up the Bodies," and this is toward the very end of the book, when Anne Boleyn is getting executed. And there are many executions in your books.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: The first book ends with an execution, and so does the second. So before you read this passage, I'd like you to just explain what's happening and who is speaking in the passage that you're going to read.

MANTEL: Well, we first of all have Thomas Cromwell, who is Henry's chief minister and the organizer of the plot to bring down Anne Boleyn. We are almost at the last moment now. Henry has sent for the executioner from Calais to behead his wife with a sword rather than the customary axe in the hope it will give her a quicker death.

So we have Cromwell, we have the French executioner, and we have Christophe(ph), a young ruffian who is a servant to Cromwell.

(Reading) The weapon is heavy, needing a two-handed grip. It's almost four foot in length, two inches broad, round at the tip, a double edge. One practices like this, the executioner says. He whirls like a dancer on the spot, his arms held high, his fists together as if he were gripping the sword. Every day one must handle the weapon if only to go through the motions. One may be called at any time.

(Reading) We do not kill so many in Calais, but one goes to other towns. It is a good trade, Christophe says. He wants to handle the sword, but he, Cromwell, does not want to let go of it yet. The man says: They tell me I may speak French to her, and she will understand me. Yes, do so, Cromwell says.

(Reading) But she will kneel. She must be informed of this. There is no block, as you see. She must kneel upright and not move. If she is steady, it will be done in a moment; if not, she will be cut to pieces. He hands back the weapon. I can answer for her. The executioner says: Between one beat of the heart and the next, it is done. She knows nothing. She is in eternity. They walk away.

(Reading) Christophe says: Master, that man has said to me tell the women that she should wrap her skirts about her feet when she kneels in case she falls bad and shows off to the world what so many fine gentlemen have already seen. He does not reprove the boy for his coarseness. He is crude but correct.

(Reading) When the moment comes, it will prove, the women do it anyway. They must have discussed it among themselves.

GROSS: Thank you for reading that, and that's Hilary Mantel reading from the end - not the very end but near the end - of her latest novel "Bring Up the Bodies," which won the Man Booker Award, Britain's highest literary prize.

You know, it's such a - you just kind of shiver hearing that passage, and it just made me think, you know, about executions, like it makes the guillotine seem very humane by comparison, you know, where you're describing that if she moves, if Anne Boleyn moves while the sword's coming down that, you know, she'll be cut to pieces, it won't be a swift death.

MANTEL: Yes, they were asking her to do something very difficult, which was to remain absolutely still in the knowledge of what was coming. But the executioner was a man who obviously knew his trade, and what he did was to approach Anne from an angle that she wasn't expecting. She was blindfolded, and she couldn't hear him because he was wearing soft slippers. And it happened before she knew.

And she did remain kneeling upright. Usually, executions were with the axe, and the sufferer put their head on the block, but Henry thought that this was a more skillful, humane way of doing it. It's strange that he should have such a scruple at the last moment.

GROSS: This is very thoughtful, if you're executing your wife, to do it so humanely.

MANTEL: Yes, it seems strange to us, doesn't it, but for a while they - the people at the Tower of London didn't know whether Anne was to be beheaded or burned. And, you know, typical bureaucrats, they're sending frantic notes saying: What kind of scaffold have we to build? When you look at it through the bureaucratic language, it all becomes even more chilling because to them it's just an administrative problem. They just want to get things done efficiently.

After all, it's not every day that one executes a queen of England.

GROSS: So I'm not sure if this is something you've thought about before or not, but I know that you wrote, I think it was your very first book, about the French Revolution, and now you've written about Henry VIII, and there are several beheadings in these books. So excuse me for asking this, but if you had to be beheaded centuries ago, would you have preferred the guillotine, or the axe or sword customarily used in England?

MANTEL: Well, it's a strange question.

GROSS: I thought so.

(LAUGHTER)

MANTEL: But no, I'm quite prepared to answer that, I think. The guillotine never failed, you know, whereas the headsman occasionally, as in fact in the case of the execution of Thomas Cromwell himself, was either not expert enough or maybe having a bad day, and the whole thing could take a long time. At least the guillotine was over in seconds.

However, you know, I am hoping this fate will not befall me.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: No, I suspect it won't. And Cromwell will be executed in the final book in your trilogy, which you're writing now.

MANTEL: Yes, 1540. The final book covers his rise and rise. He has a long way to go yet. And then his sudden fall in the execution in the summer of 1540.

GROSS: One of the things I find so interesting about, you know, reading historical fiction in a period of beheadings in England is that we're now in a period where Islamist extremists are beheading people, and it is so shocking that now people be beheaded, but when you think of the part it played in Western history, that's shocking, too.

MANTEL: Yes, and I have lived in Saudi Arabia and indeed written a book about Saudi Arabia. So whilst I am happy to say that I've never witnessed anything of that kind, you knew that it went on, that beheading and public beheading was the normal form of execution.

GROSS: I'm sorry for dwelling so much on executions, but historically, it's so interesting in your book. I mean, there were other forms of execution. What were some of those forms, and which was considered the worst, the most horrible of all deaths?

MANTEL: Well, beheading, believe it or not, was a privilege reserved usually for the aristocracy, for gentlemen and gentlewomen. Now, I don't want you to get the idea that these were weekly events in Henry's England. It's because beheadings were rare that they made such a terrible impact on the imagination of the close circle around Henry: his ministers, the aristocracy.

Ordinary people who might be convicted of theft or a crime of violence were hanged. I think there were two deaths that were more feared. One was to be hanged, drawn and quartered, which was the penalty for high treason. And the people in the book, when they were given a sentence of beheading, the men who were convicted with Anne Boleyn, would have regarded that as a mercy rather than the terribly painful and long-drawn-out death of being hanged, drawn and quartered.

The other thing, if a woman was convicted of treason, is she could be burned.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Hilary Mantel, the author of the bestselling novels "Wolf Hall" and "Bring Up the Bodies," which both won the prestigious Man Booker Prize, England's highest literary award. Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: So if you're just joining us, my guest is Hilary Mantel, who has won Britain's highest literary honors for two of her books, "Wolf Hall" and "Bring Up the Bodies," which center around Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII, his wives and his executions of his wives when they didn't bear him sons. And the third and final volume of her trilogy is on the way.

You know, I was thinking if anyone ever needs an antidote to princess fantasies, they might want to read your books.

(LAUGHTER)

MANTEL: Yes.

GROSS: Because women who were chosen as queen, that sounds really great, right, but if they don't give birth to a male heir for Henry VIII, bam, they're executed.

MANTEL: Well no, I don't think it's as simple as that, in all fairness.

GROSS: Oh, OK.

MANTEL: He didn't execute Anne - he didn't execute his first wife for failing to give birth to a male heir, he divorced her. He didn't execute Anne for that reason, but Anne had become a political liability, a diplomatic liability. And Henry did believe, rightly or wrongly, that there was a plot against him, a plot to kill him, and that Anne was implicated.

It sounds unlikely, it sounds farfetched, but the court was - I won't say happy, but they were able to along with it. It wouldn't be - let's be fair even to Henry. There was no crime of failing to bear the king a son. There was a crime of treason. Anne was convicted of treason.

GROSS: What - in doing so much research for your books about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII, what are some of the things you learned about what it meant to be a woman then, even a woman who becomes queen?

MANTEL: I think it's a great mistake to regard these women as victims. Certainly Catherine of Aragon, Henry's first wife, and Anne Boleyn, they were superbly educated women. They were strong-minded, strong characters, strong wills, and they were clever. And they were political players.

The title of queen of England could bring a lot of unofficial power with it. I think that when you move away from the figure of the queen, then women are able to exercise much less real power. But one of the attractions of writing about this period is that you don't have to exaggerate the role of the women in your book. You don't have to give them an artificial, unhistorical boost in order to make them agents of their own fate.

They really are strong; they really are involved. They're deeply drawn into the political process, and they're actors in it.

GROSS: Of all the historical stories that you could tell in historical fiction, why did you choose the stories of Cromwell, Henry VIII, and Henry VIII's wives?

MANTEL: The three books really are about Cromwell. They center on him; they're seen through his eyes. What Cromwell doesn't know, by and large, the reader doesn't know, that is at least when you're within the framework of the narrative - obviously you bring your historical knowledge to it - but Cromwell is the primary figure here.

And this is a great untold story, or at least it wasn't told until now, is all the fiction and all the drama we have about Henry VIII's reign and the figure of Cromwell is somehow marginal or missing, and yet he was central. And historians know that, but it just hadn't percolated through to fictionalized narratives.

He's the minister of everything. He's Henry's right hand. And he's powerful for almost 10 years. So he's the man who knows how everything works. But strangely because he has been left out of the popular narrative, when you look through Cromwell's eyes, this material, which seems so very familiar to us, become unfamiliar. You have a different angle.

But everything in the book, Anne, Queen Catherine, Henry, they're all seen from Cromwell's point of view. So this is not a neutral portrayal. It's not an overview. It's very angled.

GROSS: Why do you write historical fiction? And I know you haven't exclusively written that, but you're certainly best known for that.

MANTEL: Since I was a very small child, I've had a kind of reverence for the past, and I felt a very intimate connection with it. When I began, it was just being enthralled by the lives of the members of my family, who - really didn't seem to make any difference in day-to-day talk whether people were alive or dead. I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of her grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.

And as I say, in their conversation, everything was as if it happened yesterday, and the dead were discussed along with the living, and the difference really didn't seem to matter. And I suppose this seeped into my viewpoint. Instead of thinking there was a wall between the living and the dead, I thought there was a very thin veil. It was almost as if they'd just gone into the next room.

GROSS: Now there are certain, like, inherent problems with historic fiction, which is, like, for the reader, unless you really know your history, you never know if what you're reading is - the novel is taking liberty or, you know, the best interpretation of history that we have. So, you know, that line between fact and fiction is often blurred in historic fiction. What guides you about that line between fact and fiction when you're writing?

MANTEL: It's quite simple, really: I make up as little as possible. I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts, side by side, to see where the contradictions are and to look where things have gone missing.

And it's really in the gaps, in the erasures, that I think the novelist can best go to work, because inevitably in history, in any period, we know a lot about what happened, but we may be far hazier on why it happened. And there's always the question why did it happen the way it did, where was the turning point.

Every scene I go into I'm looking for these contradictions, antagonisms, turning points, and I'm trying to find out the dramatic structure of history, if you like.

GROSS: Hilary Mantel will be back in the second half of the show. She's the author of the bestselling novels "Wolf Hall" and "Bring Up the Bodies." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Hilary Mantel, the author of the best-selling historical novels "Wolf Hall" and "Bring Up the Bodies." Each book won Britain's top literary honor, the Man Booker Prize. Both are set in 16th century England during the reign of King Henry VIII, and told from the point of view of Henry's chief minister, Thomas Cromwell.

The first novel in Mantel's projected trilogy describes how Henry broke away from the Roman Catholic Church so that he could divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon, and Anne Boleyn.

So Henry VIII breaks off from the Roman Catholic Church, starts the Church of England. Parliaments makes Henry the head of the church, but Cromwell's really running the church. So outside, you know, Henry breaks away from the Roman Catholic Church in order to divorce his wife. Outside of changing, you know, the rule about divorce, are there other changes that Henry and Cromwell make in the Church of England?

MANTEL: Well, I think Henry's divorce is really is only one part of it, if you think of the enormous advantages that the break from Rome brought to England because it meant basically for Henry that he could lay his hands on the church's assets. So it wasn't simply a question of getting rid of his first wife. It was a question, as he saw it, of taking ownership of what really should be his anyway. You see, what you had in England before the Reformation was essentially two jurisdictions running side by side. The English jurisdiction and the Roman jurisdiction know this is a time of the formation of a nation. Cromwell certainly is intent on an independent England, a country that runs their own affairs and runs them in the English language, by and large - not in Latin - and has the Bible in English. That was his great crusade.

The law on divorce didn't change. It was actually no such thing as a divorce, there was only an annulment, a declaration that a marriage had never been lawful in the first place. This is what Henry thought. We call it the divorce. We would use the words interchangeably but when he wanted be get rid of Catherine and marry again, he sought from Rome a declaration that that marriage been invalid at the outset. So 20 years were wiped away. Now when Rome wouldn't give him that annulment, then there was a big rethink and it was the precipitating cause but not the sole cause of the break with Rome. Henry then had his new Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, and the decision had been taken back from Rome to England, so Henry was granted his divorce, his annulment, unto the new English jurisdiction.

GROSS: So is the Bible translated from Latin into English during the period of Henry VIII and in part as a result of Henry VIII?

MANTEL: Yes, it is. And this a great turning point. In 1538 - a time which will be covered in my third book - Cromwell actually gets Henry's blessing for the English Bible to be placed in every parish church - this is for the first time. There had been English Bibles a few years before, but they were not licensed by the king; their status was unofficial. But Cromwell actually managed to get, eventually, Henry's commitment to the scriptures in English, and the decree was that anyone who could read could come up and read that Bible. So it's a great turning point because it's giving what people thought of as the word of God to the people in their own language.

GROSS: And without having to go through a priest. You could...

MANTEL: Yeah. Yeah.

GROSS: It was accessible to you directly.

MANTEL: You don't have to ask the priest what it means. If you can read, you can read it in your own language, and if you can't read, someone else can read it out to you. Plus, it puts the responsibility for your salvation in your hands; your relationship with God changes. You don't have to go through an intermediary, as it were; you've got a direct line.

GROSS: You grew up Roman Catholic in England. Did it make a difference to be Roman Catholic as opposed to Anglican?

MANTEL: It does make a difference to me because the way I was brought up was with a very superstitious Catholicism. The faith was taught to me very badly, so I was pretty much in the position of a medieval peasant, I think. So it's not very difficult for me to understand pre-Reformation religion because essentially, it's what I was taught. And there is some advantage in knowing that old world. You know, when I was a little kid, we still attended the Latin Mass every week.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Hilary Mantel, the author of the bestsellers "Wolf Hall" and "Bring Up the Bodies." Both of those books won Britain's highest literary award, the Man Booker Prize.

Let's take a short break here and then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is writer Hilary Mantel. And two of her books of historic fiction "Wolf Hall" and "Bring Up the Bodies," which are both set in the era of Henry VIII, they both won Britain's highest literary prize, the Man Booker Prize.

So I just want to ask you a little bit about your health. I know you've had a debilitating condition for a few decades now, endometriosis and, which has been a pretty systemic problem for you. Would you just explain a little bit what the condition is?

MANTEL: Yes. Endometriosis is a condition in which the special cells that line the womb - they are the endometrium - they should be in your womb. But in endometriosis, these special cells are found in other parts of the body, typically through the pelvis, but they can be anywhere in the body. And the problem there is, they bleed each month, just as the lining of the womb does, then they scar over, and depending on how much space there is around the scar tissue, you can have terrific pain, disability. It's a disease that throws up a variety of symptoms, including nausea. It's not easy to diagnose because depending where the endometrial deposits are, the symptoms can be quite different. It's an unrecognized problem among teenage girls, and it's something that every young woman who has painful menstruation should be aware of. You've got to ask yourself, you know, could this be endometriosis because it's a condition that is curable if it's caught early. If not, if it's allowed to run on, it can cause infertility, and it can really, really mess up your life.

I suffered from it, I think, since I was 11 years old. It wasn't diagnosed; I kept getting sent away and told that it was all in my mind. When I was 27, the whole thing came to a crisis, and I had surgery, big surgery. I lost my fertility. I didn't have any children; I don't know whether I would have been able to have children. Unfortunately, that surgery didn't cure the condition. It came back, and I lived with it for the next 20 years. It's now died back, it's quiescent, but it's done a lot of damage to my body in the meanwhile - mainly because of the scar tissue laid down. In 2010, between writing "Wolf Hall" and writing "Bring Up the Bodies," I had two operations and I was out of things for six, almost nine months. I'm hoping - I'm hoping - this will be the end of it.

GROSS: So correct me if I'm wrong here. But because of the steroids that you are on to help with your condition...

MANTEL: Yeah.

GROSS: ...and I think because of a thyroid condition as well, your weight just about doubled.

MANTEL: Yeah.

GROSS: And you ended up with a completely different body...

MANTEL: That's right. Yes.

GROSS: ...than the one you used to have. How did that change the sense of who you are?

MANTEL: Well, I live my life as a skinny little thing and that's the body type in my family. And, you know, I thought I'd get old but I never thought I'd get fat. And I was given a particular drug - and I'm going back 20 years now - where my weight just went crazy and I had to, my size changed every week and I ended up , as you say, doubling my body weight and a lot of that gain took place over very short period of about nine months, so I didn't recognize myself and I still have trouble. When I see myself in dreams now I'm a fat woman, but for the first 20 years, I should say, I saw myself as I used to be and then I'd wake up and I'd think, who is this? What is all this flesh?

GROSS: Well, it must've created a strange relationship to your body because your body was already in pain from the endometriosis, but then it was like physically transformed, you didn't even recognize it, and to be, to have a body to be in a body, however you want to see your body, and not feel like it's really yours must be a very, you know, estranging position to be in. You want to feel united with your body, not like it's this alien thing that you ended up in.

MANTEL: Yes. That's right and the pity of it was that the drug in question didn't do anything for me at all. It didn't do anything to help the pain or cure the endometriosis or even stop it in its tracks. It was a complete misfire, medically speaking. But, you know, I will remember going to see the doctor who prescribed the drug for me when I'd put on the first couple of stone and telling her what was happening and telling her what was happening. And then she said, oh well, now you know what it's like for the rest of us. And...

GROSS: Well, that's helpful.

MANTEL: Yeah. Unhelpful, eh. And yeah, it was a strange process. It's very difficult for me not to regard my body as my enemy, but it's the only one I've got.

GROSS: So I'm thinking there was a period of a few years when you lived in Saudi Arabia.

MANTEL: Yes.

GROSS: Your husband is a geologist and he was working there. And, of course, there were so many restrictions on your life. You couldn't drive. You could barely leave your house unless you were escorted by her husband or another man. And I'm thinking you probably already had gained the weight so you were in a new body in a country that basically granted you no rights. That must have been such a really strange and alienating period for you.

MANTEL: Yes, it was. I went to Saudi Arabia when I was still taking this drug and part way through the strange weight gain. And as you say, out there you dress in drapery rather than clothes.

(LAUGHTER)

MANTEL: So perhaps it was going to happen that was the best time for it to happen. But I take your point, it is very strange. I lived in a block of four flats. My neighbors were, they were not all Saudis, but they were Muslims. Upstairs from me was a young Saudi couple. The wife was about 19, she had a baby. We saw each other most days, we'd have coffee and a chat, and she was a student at the women's university and I'd help her with her work but, of course, I was never introduced to her husband, and if we happened to pass in the common hallway then his reaction was to look straight through me and at the wall as if I was invisible for all my newly gained flesh. And by doing this he was showing his respect for me. Now, you have to work hard to get your head around that, that making someone invisible is a form of respect.

I wasn't wearing a black veil but he was dropping one over me. Then you go to the shops, you go, let's say, into the drugstore. You'd ask for a package of aspirin and the man wouldn't talk to you. And he'd look over your shoulder. And your husband would say can she have a package of aspirin, please? And he's say yes, sir.

GROSS: Was it hard after getting back to England from your years in Saudi Arabia to be an empowered person again?

MANTEL: Well, you know, I used to come back every summer, so my life turned into two parts - a woman who ran her own life in Britain and a woman who in Saudi Arabia simply didn't have a life to run. And sometimes when I was in Saudi Arabia I used to take out the evidence of my other life. I used to read the stubs on my checkbook thinking, yes, there was a time when I could pay for my own aspirin or whatever.

And I think it would have been very difficult to live there the year around without relief. But it was while we were living in Saudi Arabia that my first book was accepted. And so I needed to be back the following summer for quite a while to steer that through the publication process. Then we returned to England just at the point where my second book was about to come out.

GROSS: So here you were in a very, like, religious country. A religion that doesn't grant many rights to women. You had left your religion by the time you were 12. You basically gave up the church at that age.

MANTEL: Yes.

GROSS: Why?

MANTEL: I no longer had faith. I lost my belief in a deity. Not just in Catholicism but in the whole thing.

GROSS: Did you miss that presence?

MANTEL: No. I don't think I missed it, not at that time in my life. Other things came in to fill the gap.

GROSS: And you still feel the same way that...

MANTEL: No, I don't feel the same way now. I now - I envy people who have faith and I think it's possible I may regain it, although I would not go back to the Catholic Church.

GROSS: Where would you go, do you think?

MANTEL: To the Church of England, as founded by Henry VIII.

GROSS: Really?

(LAUGHTER)

MANTEL: Well, it's a very broad church.

GROSS: Don't you almost feel like you created it? Do you know what I mean? Because, like, in writing all these books, like, these figures are, like, in some way your creation. It is part fiction. So don't you - yeah.

MANTEL: I think that it's true in the sense that I have come to have great admiration for men like Thomas Cranmer who were among the founders of the Church of England and there is a certain amount of personal inspiration there.

GROSS: Well, Hilary Mantel, congratulations on your books and the Man Booker Prizes and thank you so very much for talking with us.

MANTEL: Thank you very much.

GROSS: Hilary Mantel is the author of "Wolf Hall" and its sequel "Bring Up the Bodies." You can read an excerpt of each of those books and you can listen to the audio book recording of the first chapter of "Wolf Hall" on our website freshair.npr.org. Coming up, jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviews a new album by Jason Kao Hwang who was a mainstay of the downtown New York jazz scene in the '80s and '90s and has since composed chamber works and an opera. This is FRESH AIR.

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TERRY GROSS, HOST: Violinist Jason Kao Hwang was one of the mainstays of the downtown New York jazz scene of the 1980s and '90s. He still leads a jazz quartet but since then he's also composed various chamber works including an opera. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead says his latest work puts it all together.

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KEVIN WHITEHEAD, BYLINE: Jazz reflects who we are as a people - democracy in action and all that. But a jazz tune or solo is also a portrait of the musician who makes it. The music reflects the particular background and training that helps shape how composers compose and improvisers improvise. Jason Kao Hwang makes that autobiographical component explicit on his suite for eight pieces, "Burning Bridge." His parents immigrated from China around the end of World War II, and he grew up attending Presbyterian services in suburban Chicago.

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WHITEHEAD: There is a Charles Ives-ian dimension to Jason Kao Hwang's "Burning Bridge." Ives' music was often about memory, associations and artful paraphrase-able melodies. In Hwang's composition, an imperfectly remembered hymn from childhood is a personal touchstone, turning up in several guises.

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WHITEHEAD: Jazz or improvising musicians who compose chamber works can sound a little outside their comfort zone. But Jason Kao Hwang has fielded so many classical commissions, and is so used to wandering between territories, he's sure-footed even on tricky terrain. And because the violin has no fixed intervals, he can slide easily among different scales and tonalities - from the blues to China and back.

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WHITEHEAD: Jason Kao Hwang's octet is a mixed ensemble of jazz, classical and Chinese instruments. There are drums, a brass trio including Joe Daley's tuba and a quartet of bowed or plucked strings. China's finger-plucked pipa and two string fiddle, the erhu, fit right in, but then traditional East Asian music incorporate striking textures, expressive vibrato and tremolo and pitch bends - rather like jazz.

For all the mixing, Hwang calls "Burning Bridge" a jazz composition. The improvisers energize, illuminate and personalize the written material. And that's Taylor Ho Bynum on flugelhorn.

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WHITEHEAD: Jason Kao Hwang has said the way he mediates among several musical worlds is a mix of conscious and unconscious processes. Some ideas are plotted out and some just float to the top because of who he is. That natural flow is one of strengths of "Burning Bridge." The mixing doesn't feel contrived.

Hwang's multifaceted music recognizes how we all redefine ourselves in different situations - how our behavior shifts to accommodate coworkers, family, friends or strangers. Which is to say we're all code switchers. Jason Kao Hwang makes us hear what that sounds like.

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GROSS: Kevin Whitehead writes for Point of Departure, Downbeat and eMusic and is the author of "Why Jazz?" He reviewed "Burning Bush," the new recording by violinist Jason Kao Hwang. You can download podcasts of our show on our website freshair.npr.org and you can follow us on Twitter at nprfreshair and on Tumblr at nprfreshair.tumblr.com.

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