Indian and Western Music - Fusions and Crossovers

Fusion and crossover between Indian and Western has been touched on other threads before but more in an incidental manner. I felt the need for a thread in which those of us who appreciate different kinds of music could exchange views and information on this phenomenon. So cast the net wide and post!

For a beginning I am posting a "Bollywood" clip in which a composition in Raag Tilang has been recorded with jazz interludes. I find the transitions quite well done. I think the credit should go not to Shankar and Jaikishan who are credited with the composition but to their "assistants" Dattaram and Sebastian who were responsible for the actual arrangement, the former for "Indian" and the latter for "Western" music.

So here goes! The recording could have been a spot better but none of the other links had Mala Sinha mouthing the words.

So no takers! Now I shall extend my definition of "Fusion and Crossover" to Opera/Operetta/Musicals with an "Indian" theme. Are there any opera lovers on the site? After all enjoying opera and enjoying Bollywood calls for similar faculties: to be able to suspend disbelief for three hours at a stretch (with an intermission for refreshments).

Now Alfred Roussel's Padmâvatî is my favourite "fusion" opera.

Two names that would immediately spring to my mind would be Zakir Hussain (check only his famous Colours album, with Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan. Is that not with the London Symphony or somesuch? The two of them are themselves of course already a fusion between the Hindustani and the carnatic) and L. Subramaniam. Ravi Shankar, of course. Famously played with Yehudi Menuhin, didn't he (as I guess did some others. Did Subramaniam not, as well?)

One tequila, two tequila, three tequila down !!! Before I reach that state; let me ask, when does the mix, or fusion or rap end, and diaspora or genre begin ? Why is Mahapatra cool and Hard Kaur not ? Why was Ananda Shankar lauded while Balakrishna not ? Or John Mclaughin Vs Joe Harriot ?

The Diaspora question is critical ! You ignore it (OK OK It is the tequila talking) then you have to account for Ghazal as indian or Persian fusion ? Flamengo as Gypsy fusion or purely Spanish/Moore peninsula ?

Chutney-Reggaeton, or Soca-Raga ? La India - Que Rico !

Everything is permitted. Once the thread gets moving it can spawn more specialized daughter-threads. As I wrote in the opening post: "Cast your net wide!" Even outright plagiarism belongs here.

Chico Chico from Puerto Rico morphed into Gore Gore O Banke Chhore, for example.
Of course togging up Kuldip Kaur and co. as 16th century Portuguese merchants takes some imagination. I never got around to asking any of the INA veterans I knew whether they'd had this kind of troop entertainment.

Tears roll off my eyes. The great mass migration that was called partition, changed the center of gravity of Indian Cinema. The withering of Lahore and Kolkatta began to happen as talent moved to Bombay. When PamAm regularized Bombay flight - It became easy to come over to he Big Apple's big band scene and LA's Hollywood for ideas. Before that it took yonkers.. As late as mid '90s people I knew took "Ideas junket" to Amrika - mostly screen writers, music composer's main guys (all paid through kala paisa)


As a result there were cheap plagiarism and subtle influences. The difference is in the interpretation.

Punju-Rap Vs Surinamese Chutney

According to my diaspora insiders, the evolution of Soca and Chutney was not so much as going away from Mother-Ship (India) as much as unification of the people of the diaspora in an attempt to articulate a cohesive political identity.

For a music in the diaspora to be successful it has to resonate with the populance. The kazillion billion songs that Bollywood churns out tends to not have little or no traction in the caribbean diaspora.

And this Chutney makes smile because it captures the today's diaspora youth in the West Indies I was a drinka

India Alba

http://www.indiaalba.com/about.html

http://www.indiaalba.com/backstage.html

As far back as I can remember TWA had been flying into Santacruz. Of course for a long time PanAm only flew into Palam and Dumdum (with the occasional foray into Barrackpore).

And thanks for the links, especially this one:
The language is more or less standard English. Do you have any links with texts in Sranan Tongo or Sarnami?

And now I have a question: Does anyone know which tune this song has been set to? I heard it once on a loudpeaker with a text in Italian. Unfortunately I couldn't catch either the first line or the refrain.

@DrRudi
Indiaalba reminds me of Gurkha bagpipers playing "Nainital O!". I haven't been able to find a link yet but I'll keep trying.

Golghar, have a look at http://www.sil.org/americas/suriname/Index.html. There's a Sranan Tongo-English dictionary there (and a class book. The .pdf version of the dictionary features an extensive introduction, btw), and a Sarnami-Dutch one (the latter under "all dictionaries," the other link to it currently doesn't work).

A web search on +sranantongo +texts throws up quite a lot (the Dutch and I think the Surinamese commonly spell it as one word), I guess it may on Sarnami, as well.

Sarnami I don't know much about, but apparently it's a form of Bhojpuri and some other Bihari languages (apparently many "coolies" were brought in from what are now Uttar Pradesh and Bihar). So I guess that singer above is indeed just singing in (accented) English.

I don't know what the truth of it is, but have been told that perhaps somewhat like with Dutch and Afrikaans, you get this effect where the Hindustani (so Sarnami) spoken today in Suriname kind of resembles the way it was spoken back then when people left the motherland, and so featuring plenty of archaisms and such. Maybe you can discern it from that dictionary.

Sranan Tongo on the other hand is more like your typical patois (or creole) languages. It leans heavily on English who were there first (the name itself of course means literally the "tongue of Suriname"), but you can easily discern many other influences. Portuguese, who were big in the slave trade; Spanish; Dutch, of course, though less of it than you might expect; African languages where people came from; probably some native American languages; and so on and so forth. Perhaps itself again picking up some words from the Hindustani and Javanese etc.

That song of yours (the Italian tune) I don't know, no.

You are correct. Somehow PanAm is always on my mind Delta took over my PanAm account when PanAm folder.

@nyca
I remember sometime in the distant past that PanAm started flights from Bombay, among them a Boeing 747SL flight Bombay-Bahrain-New York, Bahrain-New York being flown non-stop. That was the fastest way then of getting from India to the US.

@machadinha
Many thanks for the link. Just a cursory look at the Dutch-Sarnami dictionary shows that it is Bhojpuri with a smattering of Avadhi (the dialect of East-Central UP) and Poorbi (the urban dialect of East UP and Bihar, itself based ultimately on Avadhi). I think I could even maintain a conversation in it. Bits of Dutch have also crept in: In this case apparently via Sranan. This is analogous to French words (via Mauritius Creole) cropping up in Mauritius Bhojpuri.

Latin Jazz has always been a great synthesizer. Afro-Latin Jazz, Afro Cuban Jazz, Latin-Classical Jazz.

Let focus on two women artists who have been lurking in the bytes of my ipod

Anuradha Pal's Recharge She has from time to time done many collabrations with other musical genres. Needless to say she is talented. However she has to depend on other instruments to set the mood and stage before she takes over the creative output.

And Mariah Parker. A truely creative jazz artist. Her Sangria is a collaboration with Matt Montfort.

Finally, one cannot miss Alice, who was the early experimenter with Indian beats in her compositionJourney in Sachidhananda

I think my sis once treated me to this. Can't say it's something I listen to a lot, but I do think I liked it. I'm looking at a highly unstable stack of CD's now... may dig through it later.

Is there an Indian link there, with her or her collaborator(s)? <-- Thoroughly ignorant here, as you can see.

Thanks guys,
sent me spinning off on youtube and ended up with a stunning darabuka solo by a seeming 5 year old.
Alice Coltrane's stuff is still magic to despite the somewhat toothgrating sleeve notes on the albums. never got into her husband's stuff. Indo jazz harp? an unjustly forgotten genre.........
And if anyone had given Joe Harriot a chance to play outside of tiny soho bars or polite BBC recordings he would have been properly famous.

Joe Harriot had a very selective following - It was like artisnal brewing that only a few truly appreciate I was a teenager when he died, and I heard of his death on SW2 BBC. They had a whole program dedicated to his work next day. It was such a delight to listen to him.