AUDIO SCAN
East meets West

This Is Not Fusion
(Times Music)

MAKE no mistake about it. The debut album by novelist Amit Chaudhuri is so titled only to arouse curiosity. Actually, it does mark fusion of Indian ragas with 20^th century western music (jazz, blues, rock).

Amit Chaudhuri has been a vocalist and a performer in Hindustani music for two decades—-along side being a novelist. He says the conceptual basis for bringing together these two cultural spheres was provided by the memory that survived from his guitar-playing days in the late seventies. He was amazed to find that the mainly pentatonic blues scale, also used in jazz and rock, was remarkably similar to some of the ragas that he had begun to learn.

So, phrases from ragas were used as a point of entry into a jazz or rock standard, or vice-versa, to reach pieces like "The Layla Riff to Todi" and "Summertime".

As he has travelled to various places in the world, new pieces have emerged. If one composition, "Trucker", borrows lines found on the backs of trucks in India, Buri nazar wale tera muhn kala, another, "Motz", was inspired by a little speech made by a paper-seller in a sing-song voice in a Berlin train.

ONE always welcomes advent of new artistes, especially if they cut private albums. But that pre-supposes that they will not be cutting corners and serving half-baked products.

Unfortunately, this cassette by Kaustubh A. Sonalkar falls in that category. He has been done in by his desire to be an all-in-one. He is the singer-cum-composer-cum-lyricist here.

He is at his weakest as the writer. Some of the lines he has penned are downright funny. To take just one sample: Bin piye main ho gaya nasheela, ek ladki aur main akela. Now since when has nasheela become the way to describe an intoxicated person? And one may have heard of three girls and a lonely boy, but ek ladki and akela ladka ?

There are many more such gems. For instance, it is very difficult to digest kamariya mein jhatka laga ke goriya kahan chali.

Even such forced rhyming could have been withstood if the other two jobs were professionally done. But as a singer, Kaustubh seems to have a huge Kishore fixation and as a composer he tends to re-master numerous seventies’ hits.

Most of the songs are his solo. In some he has with him Bali Brahmbhatt, Saira Khan and Poornima. — ASC