(Fromtop) Members of Shakti, to regale the city on January 28; German jazz group Der Rote Bereich, meaning the red area, performs at G.D. Birla Sabhagar on Sunday. Picture by Aranya Sen

JazzFest 2005 was called off in the wake of the tsunami devastation, but Calcutta is still being swept off its feet in a tidal wave of jazz mania this winter, and it rarely gets bigger than this. After Mito and Der Rote Bereich, it?s the turn of Indo-jazz fusion supergroup Shakti, in its second reincarnation as Remember Shakti, to regale the city on January 28.

Later on this fabulous Friday night, ace guitarist Steve Topping will team up with Swedish bass virtuoso Jonas Hellborg and multi-instrumentalist Gary Husband ? who has performed with the likes of Jack Bruce, Billy Cobham and Andy Summers ? at Someplace Else, the Mecca of live music in the city.

Mito, the Indo-German fusion band, performs again at the Park Street pub on Saturday, following up on the enthralling show at Tollygunge Club last week.

But, it?s the Remember Shakti concert at Science City Centre that has got Calcutta jamming down music memory lane. It will mark the return of jazz guitar guru John McLaughlin to the city, where he had captivated a sell-out audience at the ITF Grounds on a hot April evening in 1984, with magical notes from his Abe Wechter Shakti guitar, with its seven sympathetic strings and scalloped fret board.

That was when the original line-up of Shakti, which truly epitomised the marriage of jazz with Indian classical music, was re-formed for a short tour of India. Missing in action this time round though will be L. Shankar, whose sheer range on his by-then famous double-bowed stereophonic violin (co-developed with Ken Parker) still constitutes stuff of legend among the city?s jazz aficionados.

Calcutta is one of the five stops on the high-profile ensemble?s current India tour presented by Zakir Hussain Promotions and managed by Pancham Nishad Creatives. The present avatar of Remember Shakti was born in 1999, when McLaughlin and Ustad Zakir Hussain teamed up with former child prodigy U. Srinivas on mandolin and Vinayakram?s son V. Selvaganesh on the kanjira and ghatam.

The core quartet, which remains unchanged and has been touring since the summer of ?99, will be joined on stage by Carnatic vocal maestro Shankar Mahadevan, who had featured in the band?s famous gig Saturday Night in Bombay, in December 2000, and also at the Montreaux Jazz Festival.

For the two surviving members from the original Shakti line-up, Calcutta evokes enough d?j? vu. Says McLaughlin: ?Our music was born in joy. I personally believe joy to be our natural state of being, and as a consequence, the music of Shakti has the capacity to bring our collective joy into your life.?

For Hussain, Shakti ?had no boundaries, no limits and no impossibilities?, and Remember Shakti thrives on the same concept.

Tickets for the Science City concert are available at MusicWorld, Planet M and Melody.

The Topping-Hellborg-Husband combine was initially slated to perform at JazzFest 2005 organised by Congo Square. Even though the annual jazz and blues music festival at Dalhousie Institute was cancelled this year, the city gets its tryst with the acclaimed trio thanks to The Park, which is presenting ?The Lord of the Strings? music trilogy in tandem with abstractlogix.com. Hellborg had mesmerised Someplace Else in February 2003 when he teamed up with the late guitar virtuoso Shawn Lane during the Jazz, Blues & Beyond tour

German jam

They call themselves ?the red area?, referring to the red zone that indicates distortion on the level meter of recording machines. The name aptly describes the approach of the group Der Rote Bereich, meaning the red area, to jazz music as it brazenly skirts the outrageous and traverses the ground between the sublime and the ridiculous.

True to its reputation, the German trio stumped music lovers at the jazz concert held at G.D. Birla Sabhagar on Sunday evening. Conducted by Max Mueller in collaboration with Congo Square, the two-set concert showcased a range of sounds ?inspired? by all sorts of situations in life one can think of, as musicians Frank Moebus, Rudi Mahall and Oliver Bernd Steidle jammed on electric guitar, bass clarinet and drums.

A poker-faced Frank Moebus, who founded the group in 1992 in Nuremberg along with Rudi, would speak of the thought that went behind each piece, which could be anything from tunes dedicated to a guy who invented a weird machine and went to jail for it, to sounds that spoke of the experiences of an amateur baseball player! Needless to say, the music comprised everything from wailing guitar tunes to serene nature sounds.

Each musician complemented the other, while launching into individual showmanship from time to time. Moebus on electric guitar was restrained and precise while young drummer Oliver seemed to be having a lot of fun on stage, launching into flamboyant percussion displays in between precision staccato drumming.

But it was Rudi who stunned with his breathless blowing on the clarinet that would double as the bass as and when the pieces demanded the sound. At times he would treat it like a bugle and at times like a conch shell, blowing endlessly till he seemed to choke, almost. The screeching highs in the music were juxtaposed superbly with almost melodic sounds, especially in the second set, which, as promised well in advance, comprised mostly ?ballads and softer tunes?.

The band, which has acquired something of a cult status among jazz cognoscenti back home, wowed the Calcutta gathering ? which included Nobel laureate Gunter Grass ? enough for a sizeable crowd to line up to pick up three of the group?s CDs on sale outside the auditorium. The titles promised the same extreme spectrums, which one had just traversed, what with names like Love me tender, Live in Montreux and Risky Business.

The group?s going to assault Colombo, Bangalore, Mumbai, Chandigarh, New Delhi, Lahore and Karachi from here.