268: Scintillating Sax, by Kadri Gopalnath

Kadri Gopalnath (India)
Scintillating Sax (2003)
7 tracks, 58 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes (both under the re-released title of Saxophone)

You may not know, but in a former life, I was a saxophonist. Not an amazing one, but I was alright, and that was quite a big part of my identity for a while. Because of this, when I listened to music from other cultures, I naturally gravitated towards the sax players. That’s easy enough when listening to Latin music, and even a lot of African music, but when I heard that there was an Indian person who used the saxophone to make Indian classical music, you know I was there in a flash.

Kadri Gopalnath is a musician from the Karnataka, the source of the South Indian classical discipline known as Karnatic music, and that’s what he plays. Although he plays it on the alto saxophone, it doesn’t always sound like one; Karnatic music doesn’t have a tradition of sax players, but it does have a tradition of nagaswaram players – that’s a long double-reeded shawm (similar to an oboe). Gopalnath’s father was a master of the nagaswaram, and it seems Gopalnath carried on that family line, albeit with one reed instead of too. That gives an interesting angle to his playing which results in little idiosyncrasies: for example, he doesn’t use his tongue to start or finish the air flow into his instrument like a Western sax player does, giving each note a slightly less defined feeling and making the long, snaking melodies blend into one.

Not only was this my first time for hearing an Indian saxophonist, I’m pretty sure it was the first time I’d consciously heard Karnatic music too. Twice as new! Although Karnatic and Hindustani (North Indian) classical music have lots of similarities, especially in terms of music theory, they sound very different. Karnatic music is heavily ornamented in a unique way, in which even a simple melody can be transformed into rapid runs of notes dancing around and in between the ‘core’ notes. There’s also the ensemble: the Hindustani set-up is usually a solo singer or instrumentalist, an accompanist on harmonium or sarangi (if the soloist is a singer) playing a repeating motif, tabla and one or two tambura providing drones; in Karnatic music, the solo musician is joined by other musicians who follow the soloist’s melodies and improvisations a split-second after it is played, giving a strange sort of echo effect. On this album, Gopalnath takes the lead of course, and he is shadowed by A. Kanyakumari on violin. It makes it sound even more uncanny, and even less like a saxophone. There’s also a very different rhythm section, here made up of mridangam (a double-ended barrel drum), ghatam (a clay pot) and morsing (a jew’s harp); the size of the percussion section shows the importance of rhythm within Karnatic music too. The tambura is still there, though. Good ol’ tambura.

Through all this, there is an irresistible jazziness to Gopalnath’s playing, although I’m not actually sure if that is a legitimate element to his music or whether I’m only hearing that because I expect to – saxophone and all that. He has worked with jazz musicians in the past and since, but the programme here is a strict selection of classical music. There’s just something about those incredibly fast, intricate runs of notes that dart this way and that that has something incredibly bebop about it. Take a listen and decide for yourself.

Listening to Kadri Gopalnath for the very first time was a confusing experience. This was a saxophonist playing a saxophone like I’d never heard it before, and using it to make Indian classical music in a way that I’d never heard before either. You know I definitely tried to play in that way on my own saxophone and obviously completely failed. There is still something odd about hearing a saxophone in this context, but in Gopalnath’s hands you’d think the instrument had been part of the tradition for centuries.

243: Call of the Soul, by Raza Khan

Raza Khan (India)
Call of the Soul (2011)
3 tracks, 41 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I’ve mentioned qawwali quite a few times here but we’ve not had a proper album of the style yet. So, with this album, it’s probably a good time to ask…what is qawwali?

Qawwali is a style of sung poetry popular in South Asia, originating in the 13th century with the works of the poet and musician Amir Khusrow. It is a devotional form sung by followers of a mystical branch of Islam called Sufism, and its words talk of an all-consuming love of God and the Prophet through often deep layers of metaphor, often evoking erotic love or intoxication on wine (Sufis are also responsible for many incredible musical and artistic traditions around the world, from the Bayefall and Gnawa of West Africa to the Mevlevi of Turkey to the Qasidah of Indonesia and lots in between). Musically, qawwali is descended from many sources, with Indian and Persian classical music, Punjabi and Rajasthani folk and Arabic music all contributing to the sound. The modern qawwali ensemble consists of one or two soloists and a chorus of between six and ten, with one tabla and a couple of harmoniums being played between them.

And so we go back to Call of the Soul and Raza Khan. As you’ve guessed, Raza Khan is a qawwali singer, a Sufi and a Christian.

…wait, what? How can he be a Sufi AND a Christian? Because the world is just bloody excellent, that’s how. He applies Sufi teaching and practice to his Pentecostal beliefs and just gets on with it. And part of just getting on with it is apparently becoming a master qawwal. His voice is simply stunning. The ease at which his voice caresses the poetry that he sings – and the wordless syllables he improvises with – as if they are made of silk. His fingers move across the keys of his harmonium with a sharp dexterity, and the range of his voice at least equals the instrument’s. When he breaks from the rolling groove to soar into the sky, the heights he reaches are incredible…and then he goes even higher.

Qawwali is intense music and a spectacle for the ears and the heart. Naming the album Call of the Soul is no overstatement. When you listen to this music, it transports you, spiritually, to another place, whether you’re religious or not. And Raza Khan proves that the religion of the singer doesn’t matter too much either; it doesn’t matter which gods and prophets are being praised, this music brings them a little nearer to us.

233: Concert for Bangladesh, by George Harrison and friends

George Harrison and friends (United Kingdom/USA/India)
Concert for Bangladesh (1971)
20 tracks, 100 minutes (2005 remaster)
Full concert film on Vimeo ∙ Album on iTunes

The Concert for Bangladesh is usually recognised as the first benefit concert of any real scale, providing a template for such epics as Live Aid. It arose from a simple idea: Ravi Shankar told George Harrison about the famine, epidemics and other crises arising from Bangladesh’s struggle for independence from Pakistan, and asked if there was any way he could help. So, he helped. He got together a small amount of his friends and they held two gigs at Madison Square Gardens, and, together with proceeds from the album, managed to get around $12 million to Bangladesh through the efforts of UNICEF. In the years since, this has risen to about $50 million. Not bad. But of course it helps when you have friends like Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Leon Russell, Billy Preston, Badfinger and a whole bunch more. It seriously seems like one of the best concerts ever to have taken place, and the recording (both as a film and an album) are impeccable.

With this being such a long set with so many amazing musicians taking their turn playing amazing pieces of music together, instead of running through it all explaining how amazing it all is, I thought I’d just outline a few extra-special moments to look out for:

• For some reason, I usually forget that there was an ‘Indian music section’ that started the show. Which is madness, because it is a jugalbandi (equal duet) between Ravi Shankar on sitar, Ali Akbar Khan on sarod, accompanied by Alla Rakha on tabla. That’s three of their generation’s most defining performers on their respective instruments, all playing together. So of course the music they make together is sublime. Apparently they played for about 45 minutes at the concert itself, but only one piece, ‘Bangla Dhun’, was recorded and made it onto the film and album. But the 15-minute piece is too long to be an ‘extra-special moment,’ but the bit right at the beginning is just right. George comes on stage, introduces the musicians and explains what this portion of the show will be about, setting the crowd up for what will likely be, for most of them, their first ever contact with actual Indian music of any sort beyond the Beatles’ and others rather clumsy experiments. The musicians make sure all their instruments (including their many sympathetic strings) are all still in tune and make some small adjustments…which is greeted with a polite applause and some cheers. “Thank you,” says Ravi, “if you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more.” Lol. Love it.
  
  
• There’s one moment that always strikes me as profoundly beautiful in a way that I’m probably projecting in an unsubstantiated way. But still beautiful: about mid-way through the set with the full all-star band, the lights go down and the ensemble shrinks to just two: George and Pete Ham, both on acoustic guitars. Tiny bit of tuning up and making sure the mics and monitors were doing the right thing, and then the unmistakable first notes of ‘Here Comes the Sun’ ring out. When he first starts playing, George is frowning a bit, which is probably something of making sure the sound is still good, but I’m pretty sure there are nerves in his eyes and across his brow. This was the first time he (or any of the Beatles) had performed that song live, ever, and he was in the very stark place of being one of two acoustic guitars in front of a sea of 20,000 expectant fans. But then the crowd recognise those first notes and a huge cheers spills forth…George looks a little bewildered for a split second before a big grin erupts under his beard. It’s happening, it’s working and they love it! Oh it gives me goosebumps, that bit.
  
  
• And Thing III: Billy Preston’s floor spot, playing his song ‘That’s the Way God Planned It’. It’s one of the best performances of the whole thing, for starters: a funky gospel piece with Preston’s heart-touchingly soulful voice singing about a perfect world, little guitar flourishes from George and Eric Clapton here and there and an organ solo that makes me do a fist-bump every time. As it goes along, the heat ramps up and up, the piece getting faster and cymbal-crashier, the refrain repeating on and over itself, lapsing into groovy syncopations, and Preston, until now singing from behind his Hammond organ at the side of the stage, just gets taken over by the energy and boogies around the stage, filling in his vocal duties on whatever the nearest microphone happens to be. It looks so much like the ecstatic spiritual trances Sufis enter when the moment hits just right, and I’m pretty sure it is basically that. When he finally makes his way back behind the keys, he makes a signal to the band, does some crazy chord on the organ (seemingly without even looking at where his fingers are going) and there is such a look of pure joy and thrill on his face that there’s no way you can’t feel it radiate into your own soul too.
  
  

There. Just three tiny, even seconds-long, moments in about an hour and forty minutes of legendary concert. But you just know that it’s all good stuff. Just think about the stuff I’ve not even mentioned. Bob Dylan’s first performance in years, wracked with stage fright and with a stripped-back group playing some of his most famous hits in an acoustic way and bringing the house down with them; George and Eric’s duelling, weeping guitars on the Beatles’ song of that nature; George’s super-catchy but commercially rather unsuccessful single ‘Bangla Desh’; Leon Russell’s voice, man.

The Concert for Bangladesh birthed many, many imitations (for better or worse), and, in that way, has had an amazing impact on the world (mostly for the better). But from a musical perspective, surely none can really live up to this particular gala of huge stars playing brilliant music together as equals. I just can’t wait till they invent that time machine.

212: The Raga Guide, by Various Artists

Various Artists (India)
The Raga Guide (1999)
74 tracks, 314 minutes (4 CDs)
Spotify ∙ iTunes

The Raga Guide is a rare thing: a wonderful resource for every level of listeners, from complete newbies, to fans wanting to know more, to serious academic scholars. The standard is such that I’m sure even hardcore disciples of Hindustani classical music would rate this collection.

Because this isn’t just an album. The Raga Guide is, quite naturally, a guide of 74 of the most common ragas – melodic systems that are somewhere between scales and compositions – used in the northern Indian Hindustani classical tradition. The guide is split between a book and four CDs. The book, edited by ethnomusicologist Joep Bor, gives the history of each raga, a musical description and transcription (illustrated with Western staff notation), an example set of lyrics in English and Hindi and a reproduction of a ragamala painting from the 17th century – paintings that describe the mood and personality of each raga.

And then alongside the book, the four CDs contain examples of every one of those ragas. While in a true performance setting, performances of a raga can stretch to hours long, based as they are around fantastical improvisation and meditation on the tones and colours of the notes and their relationships to each other…but The Raga Guide gives you the down-low of each by presenting it in the form of a very short, unmetered and improvised introductory alap section, before the rhythm of the table kicks in for a composed section or song and then another short improvised section before it comes to a close. Most of them are only around four minutes long; the longest barely touches six minutes.

It’s tempting to think that, because these performances are conducted in such an unorthodox manner, that they must be doing this ancient and noble tradition a real disservice. But while the performances here are no doubt a little shallow compared to the full exploration of the true meanings of the raga in full, these are undoubtedly wonderful little self-contained performances in and of themselves. No wonder: four renowned musicians perform the 74 pieces between them – there’s Hariprasad Chaurasia on bansuri (bamboo flute), Buddhadev Das Gupta on sarod (fretless lute), and Shruti Sadolikar Katkar and Vidyadhar Vyas on vocals (female and male respectively).

The Raga Guide really is a stunning work, of both scholarship and musicianship. Anyone with the slightest interest in Hindustani classical music should consult a copy of the book and delve deep into the accompanying albums. If nothing else you will find one of the most comprehensive repertoires of ragas anywhere, all in bitesize chunks ideal for dipping into…or delving into, deep and headfirst if you feel that way inclined.

130: The Rough Guide to Asian Underground, by Various Artists

Various Artists (United Kingdom/South Asia)
The Rough Guide to Asian Underground (2003)
15 tracks, 78 minutes
Another one that can’t be listened to or downloaded online for some reason. Here’s a Spotify playlist I made, but it is missing a few tracks, unfortunately. You can still buy the CD at the World Music Network, or even more cheaply second-hand on Amazon.

For a really long time, the Rough Guide series from the World Music Network was one of the most valuable resources in world music, providing impressively in-depth and well-rounded introductions to music scenes by region, culture or genre in the space of a single CD each, often with short but informative essays and track breakdowns in the sleeves. There were so many excellent Rough Guide compilations that I had to be careful not to fill this blog up with them. It’s a shame that lately, although WMN still puts out Rough Guides, they are nowhere near the standard they once were – nowadays they seem to mostly be excuses to repackage material from their sister label Riverboat Records, and there’s not a sleeve note in sight. Ah well. This is a blog for Good Albums, so let’s look at one of them, then.

The Asian Underground scene was quite a big deal in the UK of the 1990s, and must surely have been one of the most exciting musical movements to be a part of (although I cannot speak from experience – I was a little kid growing up in the middle of nowhere in the north-west, but still). UK-based musicians and producers with backgrounds from all over South Asia were diving into the latest styles of electronica and dance music, as well as hip-hop, jungle, new age, dub and punk, and bringing along a unique Asian spin on things by introducing elements from what they heard at home: Indian classical music, Bollywood songs, qawwali, bhangra and all sorts.

The Rough Guide to Asian Underground has all of the factors that made the Rough Guide series so essential for listeners of good music from anywhere. For starters, it was compiled by DJ Ritu, who was one of the key players in the scene herself and responsible for a lot of the attention that came its way – who better suited to give the most succinct yet detailed introduction to it?

All the obvious and most well-known names of the scene are here of course, such as Asian Dub Foundation, Black Star Liner, the State of Bengal and Fun^da^Mental (whose track ‘Ja Sha Taan’ is probably the best on here, making excellent use of samples from the qawwali of Nawazish Ali Khan and the 1940s jazz-blues of Hot Lips Page). But there’s also some interesting and unexpected entries here. The album starts with ‘Streets of Calcutta’, a great track from sitarist Ananda Shankar from all the way back in 1975 that shows how deep the roots of Asian Underground go; there’s also some of Talvin Singh’s earliest work under the moniker Mahatma T with the track ‘Jihad’ from the 80s – he would later go on to be one of the biggest names in the Asian Underground scene, even making it overground as the first (and so far only) British-Asian winner of the Mercury Prize in 1999. And then there’s also a handful of tracks that were as-then unreleased, including one by another big name, Joi.

Now that is how you introduce a musical scene in a way that can get newcomers hooked and show them what they need to know while also including new bits and pieces to interest those already familiar with it. Bravo, DJ Ritu; World Music Network, take note.

100: Beyond the Ragasphere, by Debashish Bhattacharya and Friends

Debashish Bhattacharya and Friends (India)
Beyond the Ragasphere (2013)
8 tracks, 62 minutes
Spotify • iTunes

By 2013, Debashish Bhattacharya had built his reputation as a master of the slide guitar. He played it in the Hindustani classical style in a manner similar to the sarod or vina, and made many modifications to his instruments, adding sympathetic strings, and even created three of his own: the chaturangui with six playable strings (like a standard guitar), the gandharvi with six courses of two strings (like a 12-string guitar) and the little anandi, what has been called a slide ukulele. Over many albums, Bhattacharya showed his skills as a performer, both in traditional classical formats and also composing his own pieces. He had collaborated outside of the Indian classical realm before – notably with Bob Brozman – but on Beyond the Ragasphere, he took it to completely the next level.

This is not a classical album by any stretch of the imagination, although he obviously brings those skills into play in the performance and composition. Instead, this album travels in all directions – there are pieces that are out-and-out jazz fusion, complete with synths and drum kits; others focus on similarities between Indian styles and Spanish flamenco; there are elements of country, Hawaiian and Western classical music too.

It’s the third track that is particularly stunning here. Entitled ‘A Mystical Morning,’ it’s a duo between Bhattacharya and British jazz fusion superstar guitarist John McLaughlin. By far the longest track on the album at 16 minutes, it’s laid out like a journey in itself. Starting with ambient sounds, bells and far-away Hindu chants, an alap slowly emerges, the two guitarists exploring the scales and allowing themes to emerge from their improvisations above an ethereal synth drone. After more than five minutes, the percussion kicks in – both tabla and drum kit – and the guitars (together with bass guitar from Mainak Nag Chowdbury) sketch out the basis of what’s to come. Then follows what is sort of half-way between a three-way jugalbandi and a series of jazz solos between the electric guitar, bass guitar and acoustic slide guitar. Each has their own feel, not only from their musicians’ respective improvising styles, but in the backing: McLaughlin’s solo is urgent, with synth bass and programmed drums; Chowdbury’s is slower and more inward-looking, with jazz drum kit and slide guitar occasionally punctuating the runs; Bhattacharya’s turn brings the tabla back but keeps the bass going. The themes are restated and developed with all musicians together at the end, and the listener finishes their musical feast of many courses. What a fantastic track. It’s like a whole album in itself, the way it meanders through so many different styles and emotions while never sounding out-of-sorts and never making anything less than perfect sense.

047: Sound of the Sitar, by Ravi Shankar

Ravi Shankar (India)
Sound of the Sitar (1965)
4 tracks, 41 minutes
YouTube · Spotify · iTunes

We’ve had quite a few albums from India already so far – from brass band music to acid house-ish stuff, and from Indian-inspired Hollywood soundtracks to Bollywood originals just the other day. Now we move onto the first album of hardcore Hindustani classical music from one of the most revered – and certainly the most internationally renowned – musicians of his style.

As well as becoming somewhat of a household name for bringing the sound of the sitar to the West through his performances in the US in the 1960s and 70s, Pandit Ravi Shankar also has a special place in my own personal musical memory. Although I’ve been attending festivals since I was a little baby, the first real concert I ever attended was by Ravi and Anoushka Shankar at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester. I was almost 14, we were just seven rows from the stage, me, my dad and our mate Hoghead, witnessing an utterly spellbinding evening of sight, sound and smell. Now there’s a formative moment.

Sound of the Sitar was originally released in 1965, although it’s now easier to find the remastered edition that was released as part of ‘The Ravi Shankar Collection’ in 2000. [Sidebar: the original cover, which I’ve tried to use here, is a really beautiful painting, it’s a shame that the remaster crammed it into a little corner of the cover.] The reason I chose this album in particular is because it shows why Ravi was so respected at the time – this was pre-Beatles collabs and pre-Monterey – both within India and, increasingly, to a Western audience to whom this music and these instruments were entirely new and undoubtedly mindblowing.

The first half of the album is my favourite: a 20-minute unaccompanied rendition of Raga Malkauns, starting with the slow, almost-unmetred alap section before moving onto a faster, more rhythmic jor. Malkauns is a night-time raga, so listen to it between midnight and 3am for maximum tingles. Ravi definitely helped solidify the bluesy Malkauns as one of my favourite ragas. The second half of the album introduces Ravi’s long-time collaborator and master tabla player, Ustad Alla Rakha, with a seven-and-a-bit minute solo in Sawari tala before the two play a piece based on a folk melody, ‘Pahari Dhun.’ For me, the album is defined by that opening piece – it’s actually one of my favourite recordings of Indian classical music of all. With all of the reputation that Ravi Shankar gained for his ties to the hippie movement and his more experimental repertoire later on, it’s satisfying to hear a recording before most of that, and to appreciate the work of a true master.

044: Awāra/Shree 420, by Shankar Jaikishan

Shankar Jaikishan (India)
Awāra/Shree 420 (1951/1955)
18 tracks, 72 minutes
I’m including this here as one album, because that’s the form I have it in. You can download the same songs-only compilation from iTunes or listen to the two complete soundtracks separately on Spotify: Awāra · Shree 420

This is a really good album to serve as a comparison to yesterday’s. They're both film soundtracks mixing Western and Indian classical themes with all the associated instruments and orchestras thereof, but here it comes from the other direction – direct from Bollywood! This album compiles all the songs from two classics from the golden age of Bollywood film: Awāra, from 1951, and Shree 420, from 1955. Both films were directed by and starred the legendary Raj Kapoor, and the music and songs on both were composed by the duo Shankar Jaikishan.

Now, Bollywood music isn’t really my thing, usually – the songs are usually completely melodramatic, incredibly cheesy and I usually find it hard to listen to the shrill timbres of the strings and female vocals. These two soundtracks are exceptions though. What originally drew me to these in particular were two songs that remain my favourites of the set. They’re both sung by Mukesh, and both are super catchy – and they’re actually two of the most famous songs from this era of Bollywood. I guess I’m quite basic. ‘Awāra Hoon’ is about the nobility of the vagabond; ‘Mera Joota Hai Japani’ is a more upbeat piece, patriotic and has a chorus that will stick in your head forever: “Mera joota hai Japani / Ye patloon Inglistani / Sar pe laal ṭopi Rusi / Phir bhi dil hai Hindustani” (and if you don’t understand Hindi-Urdu, that is: “My shoes are Japanese / These trousers are English / The red cap on my head is Russian / But still my heart is Indian”).

But, working in exactly the way these things should, these two pieces led me on to listen to the rest of the soundtracks, which are lovely all the way through. Even the voice of Lata Mangeshkar – the Bollywood playback icon and possibly the most recorded singer in history – doesn’t rub me up the wrong way as it usually does, perhaps because her particular vocal style had not yet become the basis of a million pastiches, nor become a parody of itself. In fact, it is her voice that leads my other favourites from the album, the pair of ‘Tere Bina Aag Yeh Chandni’ and ‘Ghar Aya Mere Pardesi.’ The two songs mix Indian classical music with disconcerting horror film music, wailing clarinets and slide guitars as well as something that sounds a little Russian, a bit of French and a good dose of sultriness. All sorts!

This album, and the soundtracks it contains, really make it stand out to me how easy it is to write off huge swathes of music that might contain bits and pieces that you’ll absolutely love. As I said, I’m not usually into Bollywood music, but then I heard a track or two that I really dug, and they dragged me further in and presented new and interesting listens. Never be afraid to listen a little bit wider, then!

043: The Man Who Would Be King OST, by Maurice Jarre

Maurice Jarre (France)
The Man Who Would Be King OST (1975)
10 tracks, 30 minutes
Listen on YouTube

The Man Who Would Be King is a 1975 film based on a short story by Rudyard Kipling. Starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine and set in the 19th century, it follows two British officers adventuring around India and Afghanistan, until one of them becomes revered as a god-king in the city of Sikandergul. It’s a classic tale of hubris punished, with more than a dash of colonialism and orientalism.

The soundtrack, composed by Maurice Jarre, is quite a mix between Western classical music, British folk and military music and Hindustani music, and features a brass-heavy orchestra and heavy use of Indian instruments such as the sarangi, sarod, surbahar and shehnai and even some slightly misplaced Tibetan horns. As is common for film music, a lot of the material is based on a few short motifs that are developed and varied throughout the film. A neat touch for The Man Who Would Be King, though, is that the most prominent motif is lifted in its entirety from the melody of the old Irish song ‘Minstrel Boy’ – a song which becomes important to the plot near the end of the film. By that point, the theme has come around so many times in so many different ways, we already know every note of it.

What I enjoy the most in this soundtrack is its very particular combination of Western and Indian classical musics that really evokes, for me, the 18th and 19th century interest that Western composers had in South Asian music. It’s heard most clearly when the Indian instruments are not playing, but where the North Indian melodic and rhythmic elements are transposed into the setting of the Western orchestra. I’m not sure whether this was Jarre’s intention or not, but I think it really captures that spirit of orientalist composition of the time: it’s rather clumsy and made without the depth of knowledge required for sensitive fusion (or at least composed specifically to sound that way). It’s that lack of sensitivity that makes this style rare today, but from a purely musical standpoint, it creates a sound that is very much rooted in time and place, and all the more evocative for it.

021: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat, by Charanjit Singh

Charanjit Singh (India)
Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat (1982, reissued 2010)
10 tracks, 50 minutes
Spotify (not in the UK though) · YouTube · Boomkat

Acid house is often mentioned in relation to this album – the music contained within shares lots of similarities to acid house, not least the use of the TR-808 and TB-303 that provide the linchpin of the sound. It just so happens that Charanjit Singh’s music predated acid house by five years – this has led some hysterical commentators to suggest that this record shows ‘the invention’ of acid house and rewrites the history books, but really, this is something completely different.

I mean, he says it right there in the title: this is ten ragas - Indian classic melodic modes and associated performance rules - played to a disco beat. Disco was big in Bollywood at the time, and Charanjit had been messing around with his fancy synthesisers for long enough to actually use them together convincingly. Instead of record a straight-up disco album, he lugged his synths to the studio, programmed in his ragas and jammed for five minutes each. The subsequent record did not sell well, and Charanjit carried on his way as a reasonably successful session musician, sometimes-composer and hobbyist synth-wrangler. And that’s how it stayed until the record was ‘rediscovered’ by some Dutch blokes in the 2000s and eventually reissued to huge acclaim in 2010, allowing Charanjit to tour the world until his death in 2015.

It’s a fun story, and quite a familiar one that seems to come around every few years with different artists, but the main draw of this one for me is literally just how it sounds. We’ve already established that I love loops and repetition, and they make the basis of this record. Add on the retro synths playing in all these interesting scales and patterns and it’s intoxicating. Okay, it does sound quite a bit like acid house, but if history had pinged off in a different direction at some point. This is one of those ones that will stick in your head; not necessarily the melodies themselves, but the vibes it creates, with your brain filling in the blanks and improvising to itself for hours.

In the end, it does have a very filmic quality to it, and I would love to see a retro technofuture cyberpunk sort of thing with this as the soundtrack. An Indian Akira, something like that. In fact, now I just want to see that.

(I have to dedicate this one to Stephen, astral voyager and gonest cat as he is, for hipping me to this one in the first place – cheers!)

013: Dance of the Cobra, by Jaipur Kawa Brass Band

Jaipur Kawa Brass Band (India)
Dance of the Cobra (2013)
12 tracks, 52 minutes
Spotify · iTunes

Brass bands have a rich history in India, evolving from the military bands imported by the British colonial rulers. Moving away from their original function, the brass bands eventually became the stalwarts of weddings, and Rajasthan had the best bands of all.

In the UK, it is the Jaipur Kawa Brass Band that are best known of the Rajasthani brassheads – they’ve released two albums, tour semi-regularly and they’re always a smash hit at festivals. They’re loud (blaring trumpets, honking euphoniums, shrill clarinets and loads of snares and cymbals), they look great (rainbow turbans, rainbow angarkhas, pristine white pyjamas. Sharp.) and they bring a dancer and a fekir in tow to do some mad tricks (watching a man repeatedly bounce a 10kg granite ball off his elbow is really...sickening).

This album is their most recent and the music featured in it is basically standard wedding repertoire: folk songs, pop songs, Bollywood hits, all that good stuff. This is one of those albums that I’ve picked for one track more than anything else. The song ‘Gore Gore O Banke Chhore’ has a long history: originally based on a cod-salsa piece sung by Carmen Miranda in the 1945 film Doll Face, adapted as a Bollywood song for the 1950 film Samadhi and sung by Lata Mangeshkar, and now it’s here as a brass band piece. Give it a listen:

What I love about the Jaipur Kawa Brass Band version is that it is obviously a footy chant waiting to happen. That melody is so easy, so fun and so catchy without getting annoying after five seconds. I don’t even know the words and I want to sing them while stumbling down the street after a few too many. I’ve told this to lots of people and I won’t stop until I hear The England Band play a shoddy version of it at an obscure European qualifying tie against Lithuania in Vilnius, uninspiring 2-0 win, yes m8.