Strings of fusion

Pandit Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, who won the Grammy in March 1994 along with Ry Cooder for the album, A Meeting by the River, in the World Music Category, is set to strum with guitarmeister Eric Clapton for a fusion album that could redefine the Blues.

By Mukesh Khosla

A full five decades after it began, 'fusion' music is ready again to strum its way into the hearts of music lovers the world over. Grammy awardwinner Pandit Vishwa Mohan Bhatt is set to tie the chords with Eric Clapton, the man many people refer to only as 'God', mentored by note-perfectionist JJ Cale, for a Blues fusion album. For the first time in years, it may have nothing to do with the revival of interest in the music of maestros like Pandit Ravi Shankar, the late jazzman John Coltrane, double-violinist L Shankar and matka-player T S 'Vikku' Vinayak Ram.

Bhatt first met Clapton during his performance at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 2002. When they met again in 2004 in Dallas during the Crossroads Festival, the plans for this unique jugalbandi were finalised. "After listening to Clapton, I realised why fans call him God," says Bhatt who, many moons ago, himself worked magic with a Hawaiian guitar and redesigned it to give it the qualities of a 'vichitra veena'. "His guitar has magic in it." Bhatt called his creation the 'Mohan veena', an amalgam of the Spanish guitar, sitar, sarod and veena, all with 14 more strings added-the instrument that catapulted the prodigiously-talented Rajasthani musician to world fame. "I wanted to invent something which gave the sound and tune of the Western guitar and could be handled like an Indian veena," says Bhatt.

Some years later, Bhatt created yet another instrument which he christened the 'vishwa veena'---a cross between the Western harp and the Mohan veena. This instrument is a monster, with
three fretboards on which 34 strings have been mounted, accounting for its versatility.

Bhatt, whose collaboration with Spanish-American guitarist Ry Cooder resulted in the 1994 Grammy-winning album in the World Music category, A Meeting by the River, says that his new musical experimentation with Clapton would give fusion music in India a‘new synergy’.

Fusion is a genre that that is the musical version of mixed world and post-modern music: it blends modern western and Indian classical-based music to form a heady broth in which the crossover lines are blurred. It began mildly in 1952 with sitar maestro Ravi Shankar-whom Beatle George Harrison dubbed the 'Godfather of world music'-and violinmeister Yehudi Menuhin playing together in Delhi. Today, Menuhin describes him as one of the three finest musicians he has known, along with Enesco and Bartok. In the early 1960s, the double quintet of Calcutta-born composer and violinist John Mayer and London-based Jamaican musician Joe Harriott put a saxophone alongside the sitar and the tabla and created the first official instance of 'fusion'.

But fusion, as ever, has Western roots: many say that its real birth took place in the mid-1950s, when two American jazzmen, John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, began looking to Indian classical music to infuse life into a stagnating jazz language. (Both jazz and Indian classical music follow similar beat up-down patterns, and they were natural cousins.)

Coltrane and Dolphy were influenced by a host of musicians that included Ravi Shankar, Bud Shank and Don Ellis, who co-led the Hindustani Jazz Sextet with Harihar Rao. Propelled by these heavyweights, fusion music began to gain cultist appeal by the early 1960s, which is why it was by no means a mainstream phenomenon, or commercially viable.

In the early 1970s, with the arrival of radical guitarist John McLaughlin and his Mahavishnu and Shakti orchestras, fusion music began taking concrete, critical form. Every Indian member of Shakti has since become a legend-tabla maestro Zakir Hussain, percussionist ‘Vikku’ Vinayak Ram, and violinist L Shankar and his brother L Subramaniam.

But 'fusion' has neo-colonialism and imperialism written all over it, which is why the euphoria soon slumped and fans returned to more comprehensible and compartmentalised pure pop and classical music. But, in the smoky backrooms of bars and in private salons, fusion has softly persisted. It has always had its hardcore fans and performers-Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek, who has mixed almost incompatible Norse and Balinese music, and has played on most landmark fusion albums since the mid-1980s, including Zakir Hussain's acclaimed Making Music (1986) and L Shankar's Song for Everyone (1985). Violinist Stephane Grappelli, who was an octogenarian when he died in 1997, was another diehard but undeclared fusionista.

In the past few years, interest in fusion music has been peaking even as collaborations prosper. Younger-generation musicians like New York-based Nitin Sawhney and jazz percussionist Trilok Gurtu are at its forefront. Among other musicians gaining popularity are Alice, John Coltrane's daughter, who started experimenting with Indian classical music in the 1960s, and Anoushka, Ravi Shankar's daughter, who is doing her own thing with the sitar. In Britain, Harjinder Matharu is leading the fusion charge (although much of UK fusion comes in the shape of Bhangra pop and Bhangra hip-hop, which classicists wouldn't touch with a bargepole). Matharu specialises in the tabla and the drums and performs with European saxophonists all over the world.

One of the most popular names in fusion is New York-based, 28-year-old Sunny Jain, whose fans call him one of the greatest jazz drummers alive. He has, in fact, been designated the Jazz Ambassador of the United States. His debut album, As Is, released in 2004, made jazzmen and jazz fans alike sit up.

There are, of course, bands that refuse, with considerable disdain, the sobriquet 'fusion' attached to their music. One of them is that finest of fine Indian groups, Indian Ocean, a cult quartet that still has not arrived at a name for its music. All it knows is that what it plays is not 'fusion'-whatever the record companies might insist. The name 'elemental music' was suggested to them, but they considered it too dorky. And so it goes.

Notwithstanding the musical angst over nomenclature, the news about the collaboration between Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and 'God' should provide fusion a fillip that it has needed for years. The peculiar thing about God is: He never dies.