Fusion confusion

There is this small thing about Kolkata audiences that draws musicians back from all over the world time and again – a willingness to keep their palms unjoined and their mouths shut while the act on stage, good or bad as it shows itself to be, unspools. I’d like to think that it was this congregational tranquillity– instead of the stormy handclap appreciation that characterises audiences in the north and the southwest – that made Anoushka Shankar choose this city to be the first stop for the Indian tour of The Anoushka Shankar Project.

So, when she says in an interview, “I felt the Kolkata show with Jethro Tull was probably the worst show of the tour. It was kind of like a rehearsal,” the immediate effect is on my choleric pride. Sitting at the Science City auditorium with an audience that obviously knew its music – even if it was an audience comprising partly of hundreds of fellow 1960s geezers with popping varicose veins and bursitis – there wasn’t the slightest feeling that the Jethro Tull end of the ‘The Piper and the Princess’ show was playing at anything less than its best. If anything, it was a time when nostalgia and memory came together in a rare and exceptional fit-and-finish.

The “good energy” that Ms Shankar speaks about came, in Science City, from knowing that Tull, in particular, would be entirely dependable when it came to belting out their own numbers. They’ve had masses of practice, and Anderson is nothing if not a polished showman who has every cue down to a half-beat. What seemed somewhat inexpert were the fusion bits that had Ms Shankar doing the thing she does with the sitar – which she does so wonderfully when the sitar is alone and unencumbered by the camaraderie of other, alien instruments. Then, again, expertise would leave fusion without much of its rough-hewn, ad lib, wonky charm. If some celestial largesse were to render fusion perfect and non-controversial, the world of music would be a poorer, less challenging place.

In many places, though, fusion the world over comes to a screeching, twanging halt, as it should. (As with Dave Holland’s atonal jazz and death metal – not melodeath, I’d be damned if there isn’t some cool if mind-numbing fusion happening there – there are times when certain kinds of music should be declared public enemy.) It seems that it’s taken Ms Shankar a while to arrive at a place that her inestimable father had reached when he composed his first sitar concerto, the first of only three, all of which he created. “People won’t touch it. It’s too difficult,” Ms Shankar laughed. Truth be told, it’s not just difficult, it’s unplayable, which is why, in a world in which every combination of instruments and notes is up for grabs, this concerto is never performed.

This musical asperity is probably what led Ms Shankar to say, “A sitar is not a Western instrument. So it doesn’t naturally lend itself to a concerto.” This is a point that critics had made about her fusion attempt with a music as ethereally Celtic as Tull’s: that the sitar is so specifically an instrument of Indian classical music that it doesn’t lend itself to any manner or degree of fusion (not that anyone’s tried some non-Western extreme fusion such as the sitar with the didgeridoo or Irish Uilleann pipes or doumbeks or African djembes and ashikos: that would be something to watch out for).

It didn’t take a critic to see that ‘The Piper and the Princess’ performance fell short of accomplishment precisely because of the visceral disconnect between Tull’s faux-Celtic progeniture and Ms Shankar’s attempt to be loyal to the sitar’s musical roots without, as she put it in her interview, “losing the essence of the raga”. She did say, though, that she had managed to not lose it in the third of her father’s sitar concertos, which he had specifically composed for her. “There is a different level of collision in the musical instruments on this,” she said. Worlds collide, and there is death and destruction. Ships collide, and all hands are lost. Cultures collide, and one or both are decimated. Words collide, and politicians are born. Musical instruments collide, and fusion is born.

If only.