Striking a Universal CHORD

AUTHOR-SINGER AMIT CHAUDHURI IS BACK WITH A NEW ALBUM AFTER 13 YEARS

- Bhanuj Kappal

Readers probably know of Amit Chaudhuri as a writer par excellence, with eight novels, four non-fiction books, a poetry collection and a host of well-cited studies and essays to his credit. But the 60-year-old multihyphenate also has a sideline in music, dating all the way back to when he was a 17-year-old high school student writing and performing English songs on All India Radio. He trained in Indian classical singing under his mother Bijoya Chaudhuri and the late Pandit Govind Prasad Jaipurwale of the Kunwar Shyam gharana, releasing recordings of Indian classical and khayal.

In 2004, Chaudhuri embarked on an ambitious, long-running experiment in what he called 'not fusion-a project of finding serendipitous confluences and convergences between the classical and semi-classical music of his homeland and the jazz, pop and rock canons of the West. His first two albums under this rubric-This Is Not Fusion (2007) and Found Music (2010)-featured re-imagined renditions of classics like George Gershwin's "Summertime", The Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" and Eric Clapton and Jim Gordon's "Layla", as Chaudhuri attempted to find the raga in the rock-and-roll backbeat.