Seven global musicians make melody without boundaries : India

By Madhusree Chatterjee

New Delhi, Jan 31 - They combine classical Indian music with western jazz, blues, funk and Persian poetry. Melange, a seven-member ensemble of leading musicians from different countries, believe in making music that has no boundaries.

The band features Rolling Stones saxophonist Tim Ries, Ustad Shujaat Khan on sitar, Kevin Hays on the piano, percussionist Karsh Kale, Katayoun Goudarzi rendering the vocals, Karl Peters on bass and Yogesh Samsi on the tabla.

'World music is about good musicians from across the globe standing together to play their own music on a solid ground,' Mumbai-based Karl Peters told IANS ahead of their concert at New Delhi's Pragati Maidan Sunday.

Put together by Shujaat Khan, the son of sitar maestro Vilayat Khan in Dubai six months ago, the band sponsored by Seagram's 100 Pipers has been touring India Jan 25 to Jan 31, performing in cities like Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai.

'Four of us - Kevin Hays, Shujaat Khan, Tim Ries and I - have been jamming together for some time. The rest of the band members joined us in Dubai,' said New Jersey-based Iranian vocalist Katayoun Goudarzi, who recites compositions by Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi to music.

Goudarzi, who has worked with Khan on two Indian albums 'Delbar' and 'Shams', reads poetry either in 'flat rhymes or melodically which comes very close to singing'.

'But you cannot call it a song. Rumi's poetry resonates with deep emotions and rhythms. He is one of the few poets to have composed poetry in different meters, along with Amir Khusro, whose Persian poetry is punctuated with Urdu verses,' the musician said.

Rumi has a 'repertoire of 3,200 ghazals, 'masnavi' or works on Sufism and Persian literature laden with references from Koran and shayaris or couplets', Goudarzi told IANS.

The musician started reading and writing poetry at the age of seven in her native Tehran. Her albums include 'Hayran' with Imamyar Hasanov and 'Rooz O Shab, Poetry of Rumi' by Reza Derakhshani. In 2006, she published a book, 'Eshgh o Vahdat' - a selection of Rumi's ghazals.

New York-based pianist Hays, who leads the Kevin Hays jazz trio when he is not touring with Melange, says his piano notes 'figure somewhere between Goudarzi's beautiful words that speak of world peace and spirituality and Shujaat's sitar'.

'World music is a back and forth dialogue in rhythms, melodies, genres and communications cutting across geography and cultures with a common message. It is a gathering of like-minded people, which is no longer out of place because it has its ears open to influences outside tradition,' Hays told IANS.

Karl Peters, one of India's top jazz bassists, 'matches his guitar riffs with Shujaat Khan's ragas and Goudarzi's poetry' and describes his 'role in the band as that of a football player in a team following the trail of a common melody without language'.

'Every music is fusion music. Even jazz is a fusion of blues, R&B and swing. I have been working with classical musicians like Sridhar Parthasarathy and Shankar Mahadevan for a long time. They teach me the parts and I put them into situations,' Peters told IANS, explaining the concept of world music.

Melange is an example of how easy it is to put parts of music together to create a world music orchestra, Peters said. 'It took us half an hour of practice for a one-and-half hour show,' he added.

Mumbai-based Peters is currently working on his new album of world music 'Global Unity 1', a fusion of jazz, funk, Brazilian and African music.