Premiere: Jazz Duo Tinctures Offer Stillness for ‘World 1–1’ Music Video

It was a slightly different time in early March of 2020 when jazz duo Tinctures released their song “World 1–1” off their upcoming album Heads and Tales. They signal a poignant sense of acknowledgment of everything that’s changed in the wake of the pandemic with a music video released via Kolkata music platform (and YouTube channel) Friday Night Originals.

The Indian classical-informed song got its title from video game Super Mario Bros, but the duo – pianist Aman Mahajan and guitarist Nishad Pandey – say they took the influence of gaming into their songwriting as well. “We often look at music as a game of interaction. Here, quite literally, we imagine different stages of a video game,” they say in a statement.

The music video via Friday Night Originals originally started out as a short documentary being made by Friday Night Originals founder Durjoy Choudhury, by his production house A432 Productions. Choudhury had began gathering footage for the documentary in April 2020, for what was called Life in Quarantine. “Tinctures approached us to provide the background score for the documentary that we were planning, at that stage. We, however, couldn’t manage to create a narrative out of the footage that we received,” Choudhury says. After all, they had videos from 90 individuals across 20 countries, from phone-shot footage of urban solitude to drone-aided overviews of cityscapes including Moscow, London, Kolkata, Berlin, Dubai, Melbourne, Stockholm and more.

Choudhury adds that after a long conversation with Nishad and Aman, they decided to use the footage to produce a music video for “World 1–1.” While songs like “Grasshoppers,” “Tag” and “See You in Berlin” have been amongst the seven tracks released by Tinctures so far, the full album Heads and Tales will release internationally on German label wisMART later this year.

Watch the video for “World 1–1” below.