Amit Chaudhuri
This is Not Fusion
BDV
Besides open, experimental structures, it also has an increasing number of songs composed by Chaudhuri in its repertoire. After its huge and acclaimed opening at the Gyan Manch, Calcutta on 15 January 2005, when both the audience and critics applauded its conceptual and musical originality, it travelled to Delhi for the 'Building Bridges: 60 Years of the UN' concerts. Then, to great acclaim, it went to Berlin, the theatreschauspiele at Frankfurt, the Lille 3000 Festival in France, the School of Music, Norwich, the British Museum, London, and to the Palais de Bozar in Brussels. In October 2007, this music was performed at some of the most reputed jazz and music clubs in London , including a sellout concert at the Vortex Jazz Club and a gig at the Troubadour.
The CD was released at the London Review Bookshop, following a performance at the Pushkin Room. In June 2008, This Is Not Fusion played again to a full house at the Vortex in London , as well as to a hugely appreciative and large audience at the Jazz Night, the Master's Lodge, St John's College , Cambridge . Amit Chaudhuri then had a full house appearance in July at the Big Sky Jazz Festival at Margate , England . He is scheduled to play at various important venues in London in October and November, including the prestigious London Jazz Festival.
Music critic Ivan Hewett said in the Daily Telegraph, London, 'Chaudhuri's 'non-fusion' music creates a striking metaphor for the urban sensibility, which today is increasingly the condition of everybody, even those who stay at home.'
Recent notice: Review of the Oxford concert on Friday the 4th of June - a hybrid event bringing together music and art - on one of Britain's best jazz websites: http://londonjazz.blogspot.com/2010/06/review-correspondenc.html
Amit Chaudhuri's latest novel, The Immortals, was a New Yorker and San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year, and Critics' Choice, Best Books of 2009, in the Boston Globe and the Irish Times. It was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book. He is also an internationally acclaimed critic, and was one of the judges of the Man Booker International Prize 2009. Among the prizes he has won for his fiction are the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Society of Authors' Betty Trask Award and Encore Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Indian Government's Sahitya Akademi award. He is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is the first Indian writer to have had a Guardian editorial, 'In Praise of ... Amit Chaudhuri', written about him.
Amit Chaudhuri's project in experimental music is the most critically acclaimed project, internationally, to emerge out of Calcutta. This year, his first CD, This Is Not Fusion , was released in Britain on the award-winning independent jazz label, Babel Label, and got rave reviews from some of the most considerable music publications in the UK. Songlines magazine, in a four-star review, said: ‘We are used to intellectual, arty Westerners like David Byrne, Paul Simon or Brian Eno doing fusion records – here is a Calcutta-born equivalent, and as good as any of them.' 'In November this year BBC Radio 3 will broadcast 'A Moment of Mishearing' by Amit Chaudhuri, on the programme Between the Ears, in which he explores the provenance of, and the tensions that inform, his musical experimentation. He is the only Indian musician to have performed (twice) at the prestigious London Jazz Festival, and he played with China's leading jazz musicians at Beijing earlier this year. He's played in Berlin, Lille, Brussels, Frankfurt, and at various venues in Britain - notably the Hay on Wye Festival, the Brecon jazz Festival, the Big Sky Jazz Festival, the South Bank Centre, and several times at the legendary jazz club the Vortex, London.
From reviews of the UK release of This Is Not Fusion:
‘We are used to intellectual, arty Westerners like David Byrne, Paul Simon or Brian Eno doing fusion records – here is a Calcutta-born equivalent, and as good as any of them.' Peter Culshaw, in a four-star review in Songlines
'Chaudhuri is both a novelist and an accomplished singer of Indian or Western styles and someone with a “dual lineage” who has pulled off something fresh and surprising. Chaudhuri's warm, uncynical tones draw you in as if to a book of compelling short stories.' www.theartsdesk.com
''A unique album... Chaudhuri, a skilled musician...unsurprisingly also writes a good lyric: try the Sting-ish "Moral Education". Fusion or not, the resulting sounds have an attractively unforced quality ...' Jazzwise magazine
"Chaudhuri's 'non-fusion' music creates a striking metaphor for the urban sensibility." Ivan Hewett , Daily Telegraph, London, 2006.
'Stunning', granta.com on the Amit Chaudhuri band at the Hay-on-Wye festival.
'Amit Chaudhuri's avowed aim is to come up with interesting juxtapositions of "East" and "West" without the banalities of fusion music – an aim we should all applaud... The results [at the Brecon Jazz Festival], combining his own ecstatic North Indian classical style with blues riffs, were engaging and unsentimental. And in Rain, which combined all this with a searching harmonic palette, they were touching, too.' Ivan Hewett in the Daily Telegraph on the Brecon Jazz Festival concert, 2009.
'Chaudhuri lets his music do the talking and it's a measure of his growing stature in the notoriously snobbish world of jazz, that he was invited to perform at the internationally renowned and respected London Jazz Festival, late last year. It's a mesmerising, challenging two-hour show offering insight into Chaudhuri's remarkable "fusion"... Chaudhuri's approach, born out of analyses of Indian classical music and contemporary western music, and conceptual and personal alchemy of music divided by thousands of years and miles, as well as language, religion, ethnicity and culture is extraordinary.' Rolling Stone (India) on the band's 2008 London Jazz Festival concert.
'An unalloyed pleasure... I really do love his voice and his style — and am very very touched by his thoughtfulness.' Stephen Fry.
I've been picking up quite a buzz about Amit Chaudhuri... I've been talking to people urging me to get along and hear him. And I've been enjoying the album This is Not Fusion. Chaudhuri is a fine musician.' Sebastian Scotney previewing the London Jazz Festival on londonjazz.blogspot.com , one of London's top 10 blogs, http://londonjazz.blogspot.com/search?q=amit+chaudhuri
'This truly is not "fusion". Chaudhuri is going back to an ur-music, a music from which all musics emerge.' Charles Shaar Murray , author of Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and Post-War Pop, on Nightwaves, BBC Radio
'Many Vortex patrons will by now be familiar with author/singer Amit Chaudhuri's modus operandi when he's in the latter mode, fronting his 'This Is Not Fusion' project: he brings together twentieth-century Western popular music (jazz, blues and rock) and raga, exploiting not only his own deep love and knowledge of Indian classical music, but also the many technical similarities between the genres, to produce a wholly uncontrived, natural-sounding musical language.The effectiveness of this approach could be gauged on this occasion, a gig taking place under the aegis of the London Jazz Festival, by the delighted surprise discernible in audience members as they recognised the various elements of Chaudhuri's pieces, and saw how readily and attractively they fitted together... Whatever he sang... courtesy of a pleasingly light, attractively husky voice, Chaudhuri rendered entirely credible and immediately accessible, blending particularly well with a sparky but stylish band to produce a memorable evening's music.' Chris Parker , reviewing the 2009 London Jazz Festival concert at the Arts Depot on www.vortexjazz.co.uk
"I've been working with everyone in jazz for the last twenty years, from Nigel Kennedy to Jamie Cullum. Amit Chaudhuri's music is one of the most important projects I've heard.' David Mossman , founder of the legendary London jazz club, the Vortex, speaking at the Big Sky Jazz Festival
'...explores the junctions between Indian classical and western popular traditions to frequently startling effect...' the Guardian
"Chaudhuri's compositions, faithfully reflecting as they do his interest in and deep knowledge of both Indian classical and Western popular music, are simply expressions of his unique musical sensibility rather than self-conscious forced mixtures of two apparently 'alien' traditions... the result is a wholly original, absorbing performance that, while it is undeniably unusual and novel, wholly avoids the many pitfalls (chief among them glib superficiality and contrivance) frequently associated with 'fusion'." Chris Parker , review of the 2008 London Jazz Festival concert on www.vortexjazz.co.uk
"Sublime music...' Wall Street Journal , Asia
"Chaudhuri is a wonderful singer-- without any qualification such as 'considering his distinction as a writer.' There is a sense of calm, a simplicity, an inwardness to his singing which deeply appeals to me." Vikram Seth , author
"Amit Chaudhuri is one of the most talented musicians in the country today." N Radhakrishnan , editor, Rolling Stone India
"Creative tension is vital to the novelist and dedicated musician Amit Chaudhuri. So too are the awakenings of various selves within the self, which is a condition of modern life. He lives in India and the UK. Epiphanies mark his journey of self discovery. As a young man he was into rock and jazz, which he felt obliged to excise from his inner repertoire as he took up classical North Indian music in the Eighties, an act of reclamation perhaps. Within a few years he experienced as series of "mishearings" where listening to one tradition, another would speak up in his unconscious, or pick up echoes: 'When I was practising the raga Todi, for example, I heard the riff to Clapton's "Layla".' That led him to wider questions, unexamined beliefs about identity and the conviction that "fusion" is a scandalous or liberating departure from canonical traditions. This is Not Fusion is a provocation and rebuff to players of the past like Mahavishnu who projected east and west as inert, static categories... Chaudhuri uses this struggle and makes torpid elements pull together to flash and burn bright." Yasmin Alibhai-Brown , the Independent
Recent book reviews - for The Immortals (Picador)
The Boston Globe
Bombay in the 1980s is the setting for Amit Chaudhuri's vividly evocative yet timeless novel “The Immortals,'' which tells the story of the prosperous Senegupta family and the impoverished music teacher whose life becomes inextricably enmeshed with that of his star pupil, Mrs. Senegupta, and her rebellious philosopher son. With exquisite delicacy, precision, and wit, Chaudhuri brilliantly depicts a modern India where preoccupations with commerce and class are derailed, often comically, by deeper meditations on art and identity. When the novel briefly travels to England, that country too is freshly revealed. “Shyamji had never encountered such silence before,'' Chaudhuri writes of the visiting music teacher's first impressions, “so much composure.'' By contrast, “Red April,'' the astonishing new novel by Peruvian writer Santiago Roncagliolo, plunges us into the chaotic, often disorienting world of modern Peru where political and paramilitary atrocities of the 1980s resurface in a series of grotesque murders. Félix Chacaltana Saldívar is the meek official who must investigate the killings in the Andean city of Ayacucho. Soon he wonders whether the insanely mystical Shining Path guerrillas who slaughtered whole communities in the 1980s and 1990s have returned. “Don't see horses where there are only dogs,'' Chacaltana's commander responds. But Chacaltana, while monitoring presidential elections in a remote town, has seen dogs hanging from lampposts. As Chacaltana's investigation lures him even farther out of his depth, Roncagliolo, with exquisite skill, compassion, and dark humor, leads us into Peru's brutal past and the personal history of this tragically odd hero.
The New Yorker (A Reviewer favourite from 2009)
Chaudhuri's languid, melancholy novel, set in Bombay during the nineteen-seventies and eighties, traces the relationship between the middle-class Senguptas and their music teacher, Shyamji. Nirmalya Sengupta, a son of privilege, urges purity in art—the ustads, ragas, and shrutis of Indian classical music—while Shyamji succumbs to the exigencies of the marketplace and Hindi film music. (Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle, sisters who have dominated popular singing in India for the past few decades, occasionally appear as the embodiment of his capitulation.) Not much happens—Sengupta's father ascends the corporate ladder, his mother takes part in recitals and shyly hopes for a record contract, and Sengupta himself discovers philosophy—but Chaudhuri lovingly evokes a fractious, contradictory city caught between tradition and modernization.
Irish Times
Human comedy is an art, and one mastered by Amit Chaudhuri. Music is both the communal magic and tension of this delicate and gracious novel. The immortals of the title may well refer to the many songs sung, but there are other immortals present: the characters, ordinary people sustained by hope. Most evocatively of all in Chaudhuri's fiction is the bustling life of India, which sighs, sings and shouts from the pages.
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