A mit Chaudhuri, the singer-songwriter and composer, doesn’t believe in operating in the prescribed limitations of musical anatomy, rather he likes wandering around from the old realm to the new and improvising in the process. He has become a ‘not fusion’ performer and thinker and views raga, khayal and alankar from new perspectives. Chaudhuri has explored his ‘not fusion’ side with albums like Not Fusion in 2007 and Found Music in 2010 and he re-establishes his unconventional musical acumen with his latest album, Across The Universe. A chat with the maverick writer and musician.
Across The Universe is finally out after 13 years of your last album in the ‘not fusion’ project. How are you feeling?
I’m going deep into myself and I’ll say, riskily, that I’m proud of it — of the internal variations within the album that make each song different from the other while they remain connected by an acoustic sound and vocal improvisations. Variations in texture are as important to me (both as a listener and composer) as harmonic settings or melodies. A lot of the variation here also comes from the responses and subtle build-up from the really wonderful musicians — Adam Moore on guitar (who also did the terrific mix), Matt Hodges on piano, Paul Williams on bass, and Nafees Irfan on tabla.
How long have you been planning it and was it originally designed to be a five-track album?
I have been planning it, or have had ideas about putting it together, for ages. Although some of the novels I’ve written have gestated in me for a decade, this has been with me for an unusually long time. I thought it was going to be five tracks for some time, and I knew what those tracks were. Then I took out one — Sympathy for the Devil, of which I have a version with improvisations, and which can be heard on an album called Live at King’s Place, and included a more recent obsession, The End.
The album starts with a Gauhar Jaan song. Tell us about that.
At some point, I felt that the words that Gauhar Jaan often said at the end of her recordings — ‘My name is Gauhar Jaan’, had the potential of being explored compositionally. As a songwriter or composer or improviser, I deal mainly with what the artist Marcel Duchamp called ‘found material’: bits and pieces that are lying around in the culture. The words ‘My name is Gauhar Jaan’ was one such bit of found material. Once the riff and opening chords came to me — rather odd, dark chords about which I’m not sure where they came from — the rest of the song, which takes Gauhar Jaan to a completely different domain from the one she belonged to, followed and fell into place.
Tell us about your process of arranging the songs and reimagining the classics in a different way. How organically does it happen to you?
It does happen organically, that is, I can’t force myself to rethink a classic or extant work. I don’t say to myself: ‘It would be nice to do a version of that song.’ With The End (by The Doors), the prompt happened while listening to it on a flight to London. Robert Krieger’s simple but beautiful opening riff reminded me of jhala on the sitar. I began to unobtrusively hum a dhrupad-style nom-tom alap while listening to the song on the aircraft. Later, I found that Krieger had actually learnt the sitar from Ravi Shankar and had tried to approximate jhala on the guitar. So the idea of the riff as jhala was key, and I worked around it, deciding to sing the words only briefly, as a kind of departure — making, instead, the riff my version’s mainstay. With Lennon’s Across the Universe, I found that, while humming the tune during a traffic jam in Kolkata, I had begun to improvise on it to the sargam (or notes) of raga Rageshri. I thought I’d take the idea further and figure out some chords. Again, the ‘jai guru deva/ nothing’s going to change my world’ bit comprises the only words I reference, and I change the tempo slightly over there to create what I earlier called an internal variation.
I look for points of entry that allow me to move from one musical system to another in these performances. In The End, the point of entry was the riff; in Across the Universe, it was Rageshri.
Cover of the album, Across The Universe
Do you have a favourite among the five tracks?
I suppose I have favourite bits in all the songs. But I don’t think I have a favourite track.
How do you think you as a musician and your ‘not fusion’ project have evolved over the years?
The ‘not fusion’ project was the first project where I knew every side of me — musician, writer, critic, listener — was at work. It helped me understand music as a form of thinking and maybe even led me to rethink the raga and the khayal. Even as a Hindustani classical musician, I have now become a ‘not fusion’ performer and thinker, a person who sees raga and khayal and alankar as always having arisen from new perspectives on available musical material. I see each raga as a perspective on a melody that was most probably already there. This, for me, shifts the raga from the domain of the shastriya to the realm of process and thought.
Are you working on any new songs?
I created two ragas — again, in my capacity as an artiste who deals with found material. The first raga, which I have not named, came about as an investigation into a cheesy tune, O Sole Mio, leading to a new raga that’s a bit like Nat Bhairav, but has a shuddh dhaivat (a natural sixth) in the descent. This is in keeping with the structure of O Sole Mio. The other, which I call raga Rammohan, combines elements of two ragas — Ravi Shankar’s Mohankauns, from which I take the idea of Mohan, and Ramkali, from which I take Ram, to make Rammohan. I moved from Mohankauns to Ramkali in raga Rammohan through certain notes the two have in common — ga ma, komal dha, komal ni. These notes give me my ‘point of entry’.