Amit Chaudhri – Redefining Fusion Music

Shamik Bag

“The musician in me didn’t happen one day by accident,” says writer Amit Chaudhuri.  Having picked up the guitar at the age of twelve, he dreamt of a career as a singer-songwriter in the rock & roll mode. By sixteen however, he was beginning to have doubts, feeling the need to be “authentic to his cultural heritage,” and with it the desire to study Hindustani Classical music. He began training as a vocalist, first from his mother, Bijoya Chaudhuri, a Rabindra Sangeet singer, and then from Pandit Govind Prasad Jaipurwale of the Kunwar Shyam Gharana, and later with Pandit A Kanan. He was in performing in public in the late Eighties and by the early Nineties, HMV had put out his first recordings.

But music remained largely a past time, as he concentrated on making a career as a writer, poet and critic. The 48-year-old Chaudhuri, who has a doctorate in Critical Theory and the Poetry of DH Lawrence from Balliol College, Oxford, and has taught at Oxford, Cambridge, Columbia and Berlin’s Free University, is currently the Professor in Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia in the UK. A fellow of the prestigious Royal Society Literature, he is the author of five highly regarded novels including the recent The Immortals, which was a New Yorker Book of the Year for 2009. He rekindled his passion for music after he returned to India in the late Nineties. “In my sixteen years in England, from 1983 to 1999, I didn’t listen to Western popular music,” he says. “When I returned to India, I found myself listening to it again, and noticed the similarities, while listening to Jimi Hendrix, between the pentatonic blues scale and certain pentatonic ragas. And then, one morning, while practising the raga Todi, I thought I heard the riff to ”˜Layla’ in some of the notes I was singing.” Thus was born the curiosity to blend Hindustani classical with rock, blues and jazz at a structural level, which culminated in his 2007 album This is Not Fusion. It went largely unnoticed in India, but was received warmly by critics in the UK.

The name This is Not Fusion, referred to Chaudhuri’s attempt to redefine the term “fusion music” beyond the mere “physical meeting-point” between Western and Indian musicians which has been the norm in this country for long. He wanted to explore the “musical and conceptual meeting-point in which musical lineages intersect, and renovate themselves and become altered by this contact.” A cross-fertilisation between the two musical traditions. As he wrote in his album liner notes: “These musical intersections already exist, in structural similarities between ragas and rock melodies, for instance, or between Western folk melodies and Indian ones, mainly in the form of the pentatonic scale found in the blues and also in Indian music in ragas such Malkauns and Jog; the aim is not only to take advantage of these musical intersections between the two traditions, but to attempt to create a language of music and performance out of them.” Chaudhuri heard raga Todi in Eric Clapton’s guitar riffs on ”˜Layla,’ and raga Malkauns in Gershwin’s ”˜Summertime,’ which for him became a “point of entry” towards creating his own Hindustani classical infused versions. As he put it: “That point of entry might be a phrase from a raga, through which one might access, afresh, a jazz classic, or a handful of notes from a blues or rock composition, through which one might enter a raga.”

While he discovered his own métier as a composer with the first album, Chaudhuri takes his exploration to even more daring heights with Found Music (EMI). He throws everything into the blender in this one – his extensive knowledge of Hindustani classical, rock, pop, Western classical, blues, jazz, poetry, Hindi film music, and even Lone Ranger comics – to produce an album that is lusciously beautiful. The name itself is a play on French painter Marcel Duchamp’s term “found object,” which Chaudhuri interprets on the This is Not Fusion liner notes to mean that all musical compositions “”¦ already exist in one form or another, and have been given, hopefully, another dimension and lease of life through art.”

The most complex track on the album, ”˜Famous Blue Raincoat Suite,’ is also the best. This melancholic version of Leonard Cohen’s 1971 hit starts with a soaring trumpet playing the first movement of Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo’s ”˜Concierto de Aranjuez,’ blending into Chaudhuri’s vocals in Mishra Kafi (which according to Chaudhuri follows the same Spanish scale as the concerto). Cohen’s poem of love and heartbreak follows interspersed with verses from two Hindi film music classics, ”˜Yeh Raate Yeh Mausam’ from Dilli ka Thug and ”˜Yeh Mahalon, Yeh Takhton, Yeh Tajon ki Duniya’ from Pyaasa. Despite so much being packed into single song, the end product is seamless, and stunningly evocative.

Another stand-out is the 1963 R&B classic ”˜On Broadway’ (written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil for The Drifters) set to raga Gavati, and rendered as a daydream of a New York-based immigrant Indian cook. Chaudhuri’s contemplative vocals are a perfect foil to George Benson’s famous silky smooth version of the song from 1978. Other tracks include The Beach Boys’ 1966 surfer hit ”˜Good Vibrations’ set to ragas Kalavati and Abhogi, and The Beatles’ ”˜Norwegian Wood’ in raga Bageshri. The remaining six tracks are Chaudhuri’s original compositions, where his flair as a writer is full display. ”˜Saraswati’ which starts with the blowing of the traditional conch is both an invocation and a lament about the state of music in India: “Did you leave the world/Did you take the pearl/And leave behind the roar?/Won’t we hear your strings any more?” ”˜Country Hustle’ is about growing up in Mumbai reading Lone Ranger comics. ”˜Messages from the Underground (Break on Through),’ a play on the London Underground warning ”˜Mind the Gap,’ is a rumination on liberation, freedom and the gap between the rich and poor around the world with references to the likes of Hugo Chavez, Telesur (the Latin American television network the Venezuelan president set up to counter the influence of American and European television), and lack of rain in Ethiopia, ending with a determined rendition of The Doors’ ”˜Break on Through.’

As a performer with an original voice, Chaudhuri more than triumphs with this album. “You have to be yourself as a performer or as a songwriter,” he says about his life as a musician. “You can’t be trying to emulate anyone else. You can of course rework others’ works and sounds. What TS Eliot said about poets – ”˜Mature poets borrow or steal, immature poets imitate’ ”“ is also true for musicians. You can’t be attached to a national identity ”“ the idea of being “Indian,” for instance, if you want to innovate. To write a song, you should think, listen, and read a lot.” Not surprisingly though he has been able to find more success with his music in the UK, where he lives part of the time, than in India. Found Music was first released on the UK label Vortex Babel and he is a regular at the prestigious London jazz club Vortex and has played at Brecon Jazz Festival, Big Sky Jazz Festival, Hay on Wye Festival and the London Jazz Festival, among others. But India has proved to be tough both in terms of album sales and getting concert bookings, specially in Mumbai and Delhi. “It’s just that a true jazz or experimental music circuit doesn’t exist in India; you need hard work, generosity, vision, and, importantly, institutional and financial support for that to happen,” he says. Mumbai, though will get a chance to see him perform at the Kala Ghoda festival this month.