This is Not Fusion
Writer Amit Chaudhuri (about whom my views here and here) has a new music album coming out. Salil Tripathi has a report in the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal. An excerpt:
The new album, “This is Not Fusion,” performed in London, Lille, Brussels and Kolkata, will be released later this month in India. It is about leaving one tradition for another through a half-remembered tune and improvising the melody. Music critic Ivan Hewett writes in the Daily Telegraph: “There is all the difference in the world between a genuine cultural fusion and a shotgun wedding…[Mr. Chaudhuri’s] novels deal with the difficulties of the cross-cultural lives [of many people] like himself who’ve been educated abroad. Returning home, they find their sensibilities have changed, and with that change there comes a confusion.” The songs born from that confusion are an exchange between two traditions.
And so Mr. Chaudhuri discovers hints of raga Gurjari Todi — one of several forms of classical melody — in Eric Clapton’s riff in “Layla,” and as he listens to Auld Lang Syne, the melody from the Scottish highlands, he recalls Pahadi tunes in raga Bhopali. “I find these transitions fascinating; they are the result of mishearings, but these mishearings matter to me,” he says. “It is as if those pieces were separated at birth.”
