Subhen Chatterjee: In tribute to the masters

September is the season for strains of peace in the US. It’s also a window of Indian taals and tempos to strike a vibrant chord and break beat barriers.

While the city duo of Santanu Bandyopadhyay and Neel Adhikari is regaling American audiences with a rare repertoire of east-west vocal fusion, Calcutta is contributing to the US raga rendezvous through instrumental representation too.

Home-grown tabla exponent Subhen Chatterjee, who has collaborated with the likes of Paul Horn and David Crosby and played at Woodstock Revisited, is on a tour of the US with Jesse Bannister, regarded as one of the finest avant garde jazz saxophonists in the UK.

Completing the fusion trio for the “Crosswinds World Peace Tour” is sarod player Rajeeb Chakraborty, also from Calcutta.

An album, Crosswinds, featuring the threesome, is being released on the occasion.

They are performing at major concert venues like Air & Space (Smithsonian Institute) in Washington DC, Atlanta, Nashville Tennesse Country Club, San Francisco (at the World Peace Festival), Texas, Detroit, New Jersey, Phoenix and Portland.

“Jesse has been learning Indian music for more than a decade and like (John) McLaughlin, can create magic on taals,” Subhen, who performed at the Toronto Eric Clapton Guitar Fest with Viswa Mohan Bhatt last year, tells Metro from the US.

The first part of the “purely acoustic” Crosswinds set is Indian classical, and the second section is devoted to “world music”.

Subhen, who has been at the forefront of the Indian world music movement with his fusion ensemble Karma, will perform Karma staples Water on Ganges and Lovely Day (based on Raga Jog), besides a “specially-composed” piece, Crosswinds, “inspired by Beethoven’s Moonlit Sonata”, at the US stops.

The tabla and percussion artiste, who has launched Friends of Drums, an experimental musical movement to support talented musicians fallen on hard times, and also participated in Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD (World Organisation of Music & Dance), is readying his next Karma album for an October launch.

Jai Guru, to be released nationally and internationally simultaneously by Saregama, is Subhen's “tribute” to the great composers of Indian classical/light classical/folk music.

“All the compositions are based on our rich heritage of light classical music or bandishes on thumri, kajri, dadra, jhoola and hori," he explains.