Inspiration lurks in a moment’s listening

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One fine day, when musician Amit Chaudhari was singing Raag Todi, a morning raga, he heard riffs of Eric Clapton’s Layla in those intricate notes. That sparked off the inspiration that would translate into an eclectic oeuvre — A Moment of Mishearing, where Amit chronicles his tryst with those moments, where he misheard innocent notes in unexpected places leading to some great musical creations of our time.

“Once, when I was at the lobby of a hotel, I heard a santoor playing in the background. And when I listened carefully, I could find traces of Auld Lang Syne in the melody. It was on a five-note pentatonic scale, common to Western folk music from Ireland or Scotland. This mishearing led me to explore coming together of the various musical lineages,” says this musician, who has recently performed in the country as a part of The Park’s New Festival, orchestrated by the Prakriti Foundation. Amit was awarded the Arts Award and a grant of £25,000 from the Arts Council, England for the path-breaking project.
Growing up in erstwhile Bombay, Amit, like any other Indian child, grew up listening to film songs. “But there wasn’t much currency for it at home. In the 1960s, film music wasn’t that respected in a middle class household though it was popular. My mother would sing (Rabindranath) Tagore songs — I loved her approach towards these songs. It inspired me as a writer and musician. Then, there were the songs from My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music,” recalls Amit.
He had discovered The Who and the early version of the BeeGees at the age of nine. “I used to listen to The Beatles and American folk music and singer-songwriters like James Taylor, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and others. I also played the guitar, sang for AIR, started listening to Hindustani classical music and eventually started taking lessons from Pandit Govind Prasad Jaipurwale. I went to the UK and continued learning, but the new kind of music back then was disco and bands like Duran Duran — I shut them out completely,” reveals this author and essayist, who is a graduate from the Balliol College, Oxford.
For Amit, writing and music are both important facets of his life. “My first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address, was out in 1991. So I have been a published author for a long time. And, I have been into music since I was a teenager. These are two parallel streams — I divide my day and life into that of a writer and an essayist as well as a musician and an experimental composer. I can’t lead a life without one or the other,” says the author who has won many prestigious literary awards.
Amit is firm about his music not being fusion. His earlier album was called This is Not Fusion. “It was a bit cheeky,” concedes Amit, “But I wanted to distinguish it from the kind of association fusion music brings. In most fusion bands, there are Indian and Western musicians coming together. My projects are physically and conceptually different. There is only me, and the Western and Eastern elements are my memories coming through my experiences,” says this musician, whose version of The Beatles’ Norwegian Wood has a Hindustani raga, Raag Bageshri, blended into the composition.
He thinks audiences for Hindustani classical music are open to experimentation. “When people first began to listen to Miles Davis, he had influences of electronic and punk music, which was presented to his traditional jazz listeners. But while listening to these new sounds, once the fusion takes place in an interesting way, the traditional listeners evolve with the music,” he explains.
For Amit, there are certain sounds that inspire him. “There are sounds that I hear every day, and when I look at these in a new light, they become unfamiliar and translate into inspiration,” he concludes.