This Is Not Fusion
I have been taking great pleasure in listening again and again to the writer Amit Chaudhuri’s collaborative album “This Is Not Fusion.” There’s conceptual seriousness here and also play; a fine mix of experimentation and wit. The sounds and phrases stay in the mind long after you have finished listening to the song. I recognize different parts of myself in this music.
Amit explains the project in a note to the listener:
This Is Not Fusion is a project in experimental music bringing together genres in 20th-century Western popular music (jazz, blues, rock) and the Indian raga. Its first performance took place in Calcutta on 15th January 2005. At that time, this is what I’d said about the basis for the experiment: ‘It’s my concern, in this project, to think beyond a physical meeting-point between musicians of Western and Indian traditions (which is what “fusion”, in the ordinary sense, usually is), towards a musical and conceptual meeting-point, a space in which not only musicians encounter each other, but in which musical lineages intersect, and renovate themselves and become altered by this contact. 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. One is really seeking a “point of entry” into one musical tradition or system through another one.
One song explores the intersection between Clapton’s “Layla” and the raga Todi, another enters the raga Malkauns via Gershwin; “Trucker” is a song borrows lines from the backs of trucks in India “Buri nazar wale tera muh kala” while yet another called “Moral Education” is based on the English-language charts sold on the pavements or hung up in the classrooms in municipal schools.
Only today did I discover that Amit also has a website–you can find information about this music there, but also links to his novels, articles and poetry. Here’s a short poem that I stole from there:
Apples still come from Kashmir
Apples still come from Kashmir
pale pink in crates in winter’s market.
Each grew through the year till it absorbed
the valley’s sweetness and undertaste
and reached its final shape and weight.
They are not dead, but come to fruition.
When you bite them, not blood,
but the valley’s clear juice floods your mouth.
