Purbayan Chatterjee is a sitar maestro from India who dissolves many musical boundaries, and with local Indo-Jazz fusion band Takadimi, they deliver a Bitches Brew to placate the icy wet maelstrom outside. They lay down some of their own tempest.
Chatterjee is based in Mumbai, India. He started learning sitar from his father. He is an alumnus of the famous Senia Maihar Gharana school of music.
At fifteen years of age, he gained the President of India award for Best Instrumentalist in India. Many other accolades have followed.
Has played with stellar internationally-renown traditional musicians like Ravi Shankar, Ustad Akbar Khan and Nikhil Bannerjee. From the West there are collaborations with the calibre of musicians like Pat Metheny and Bela Fleck.
Many of the audience here at the Creative Jazz Club have seen him perform previously. It is my first time, and I am intrigued.
Takadimi are a genuine East-West fusion band led by tabla player Manjit Singh, a classical Indian music teacher at Auckland University. The rest are Jazz musicians. Alan Brown piano and keyboards, Cam McArthur double bass, Swap Gomez drums and Singh’s partner Daljeet Kaur vocals.
An additional player tonight is Ben Fernandez on keyboards.
The night commences with a Kalyani raga. It is Chatterjee and Singh on stage but only the sitar is played. Familiar ringing acoustic tones which start at the sedate pace of a tranquil meander through a sunlit forest, slowly gathering pace and complexity. There is a hypnotic pull.
When the full ensemble come on stage, Chatterjee picks up the Dho. This is a hybrid of a sitar which the musician has designed himself. It is not an electric sitar, which is a modified guitar. This has a transparent body which could be perspex, or it could be carbon fibre. It has been described as a doppelganger to a sitar.
To hear it for the first time is to be slapped around the head with the shock of the new. In a good way. A much thicker and heavier tone than the ringing acoustic. It is plugged in, but the energy feels larger than mere electricity. He could call it a Tesla.
The piano lays down some jazz licks at speed. The engine room of bass and drums provide thrust. Rock guitar sounds appear, at times it appears to merge with the keyboards. The band become amorphous and atonal. Elemental energy which is strange and filled with wonder.
Music which you can immediately connect to as, even as you hear it for the first time. It appears to come from a timeless source, and Eastern music has a lineage going back to ancient mystical times.
After the chaos comes Lullaby. The acoustic sitar is taken up and lays down a soothing melodic bed. Nice piano fills and drum signatures. Chatterjee takes his only true vocal here, a soothing tenor, whilst intertwining the sitar like masala into the ensemble sound. He tells us later, that represented the dream sequence of the sleeping child (or parent).
They play a Takadimi original, Ninety Mile. The horn sound seems to emerge from the dho and keyboards combined. Jazz Rock tones and you can hear echoes of Pat Metheny and Jimi Hendrix.
When Daljeet Kaur takes a cameo, she starts with a lament and progresses to a qawwali vocal. Electric followed by acoustic sitars elevate this one.
After a short interval, the ensemble breaks out Peace of Mind. Maybe the most Western sounds of the evening. The drummer gives it a propulsive drive. That dho sounds like molten liquid glass continually shape-shifting. Elevated Surf music as it heads into the stratosphere. Everyone gets to solo.
A keyboard and piano duet eventually leads into the familiar Bach Minuet. It is also the melody for A Lovers Concerto by The Toys, a classic Sixties Girl Group.
A version of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five is superb. Unplugged sitar sends out crystal shards. Tribal rhythms abound.
Purbayan Chatterjee with Takadimi finish on an improvised raga which they name Anthology. One last blast of alchemy from the maestro to settle the outside tempest.
Rev Orange Peel
