Kinsmen, Amit Chaudhuri, Miles from India

I enjoyed listening to Rudresh Mahanthappa on NPR’s Fresh Air last week, though I didn’t quite catch the math-y details discussed in the conversation. I had written to Rudresh, in February, asking him where I can get a copy of Kinsmen, his work with Kadri Gopalnath, in India and I got an email reply from him saying that it’s not available in India yet. I had liked what I had heard on the NPR site, though I am not a great fan of “fusion" as such. Just before that I had listened to a song sample of the high profile east-west-fusion jazz band Miles from India, Miles’ “All blues” (my favorite Kind of Blue track) interpretation, which I didn’t like much. I found it to be, to use a cliché, “more of confusion than fusion”.


In 2007, I learned about Amit Chaudhuri’s “This is not fusion" album from Amitava Kumar’s blog and bought the album from a record store here in Bangalore. It is a fantastic album, the catchiest tracks on the album are surely Chaudhuri’s interpretation of “Layla” in raag Todi and his version of Gershwin’s “Summertime”. Even though I haven’t heard much of Hindustani music, the tracks of improvisations of Hindustani ragas with accompaniment of western instruments were really interesting. Though the title of the album says “This is not fusion”, it is essentially a fusion album! As Ananda Lal, Professor of English at Jadavpur Universtity, Kolkata, writes in the liner notes of the album:

To tell the truth, all music is fusion. No musical form remains untouched by acculturation, though classical pundits still turn up their noses at the perjury committed by colleagues who jam with jazzmen. To pin those purists down on hybridization, just ask them how their ragas Kafi or Miyan ki Malhar got their names, or how violin found such a hallowed place in south India.

The only explanation for the title of Amit’s album is that it is not a fusion album in a traditional sense, where a eastern celebrity musician works with a western celebrity musician to produce a “fusion” album.

I guess, as long as it is not fusion for fusion’s sake, it would sound as good as any other genre in music.