The Amit Heri Group performs at Roxy. Picture by Rashbehari Das

With its jazz-rock performance at Roxy, the Amit Heri Group officially marked the closure of the Calcutta chapter of the Rock Street Journal Pub Rock Fest on August 11. The audience — a motley mix of city musicians, jazz and Saturday night party-hoppers — witnessed a unique blend of precise execution and musical colourings from the trio of guitarist Amit Heri, drummer Ranjit Barot and bassist Karl Peters.

The Amit Heri Group — a band spearheading the jazz-fusion movement in the country — took its audience through a journey that highlighted common traits between the otherwise-conflicting musical cultures of the east and the west. Playing with virtuosity, backed ably by Peters and Barot, Heri gave rise to a new vocabulary of musical expression that left the audience crying for more.

Accompanying the trio was Monojit “Kochu” Dutta on the congas. The call-and-answer sessions between Barot and Dutta (percussionist and band-leader of Orient Express and Los Amigos) were thoroughly enjoyable. The trio’s compositions usually circled around a written ‘head’, followed by series of improvised solos by the individual musicians, leaving more options for melodic inventions and finally a dramatic return to the opening theme.

Barot was a joy to listen to — and watch. According to Barot, music can only be of two kinds: good and bad. The latter bends towards people’s expectations and unreasonable worship of the popular, while the former is something that comes across as unique and enthralling.

And that is precisely what the gig was all about. With songs like Elephant Walk, What’s That Smell, Peace Song and the incendiary closer India Funk, the Amit Heri Group drew as much from bebop as from Carnatic classical music. Within that space, John Coltrane’s Resolution found equal resonance as the Rajasthani folk song Nimbuda, offered by the band in a reworked avatar.

This was one concert that the city will remember for some time to come.