By Annie Samson
Experiments with songs and music are always on the mind of award-winning writer Amit Chaudhuri, who recently toured the country with his unique multimedia music concert, a project that finds its origins in pure chance.
The concert “A Moment of Mishearing”, a mash-up of film and audio, is a narrative of how Chaudhuri begins to hear classical Hindustani ragas inside western tunes and his subsequent plunge into a full-fledged career as a recording and performing artiste.
“The idea was conceived by me. I have been a serious musician for a long time now and have been giving concerts and many people wanted to know more about how it began. I thought why not put together a narrative that I tell audiences and convert experiences of mine into this multimedia project,” Chaudhuri said.
The author-musician recently participated in The Park’s New Festival, organised by the Prakriti Foundation in six cities including Delhi.
In the new live “concert”, Chaudhuri takes the viewer through a narrative interspersed with visuals, song and words. He says he first had a “mishearing” midway while practising the morning raga Todi, the riff to Eric Clapton’s “Layla”. Then several years later, the author had yet another “mishearing” when he was certain he heard “Auld Lang Syne” a Scottish melody, amid the santoor strains played in the lobby of a hotel in Kolkata.
Much later returning to India after a brief stint abroad Chaudhuri “mishears” Indian ragas while listening to a blues album by American musician Jimi Hendrix.
“I don’t go looking, these ‘mishearings’ happen by pure chance. The inspiration could be from anywhere and any type of music. It can be even from a car horn,” says the author, whose first music project “This is not Fusion” experimented with disparate elements like raga, blues, jazz, techno and disco genres of music coming together in 2004. It was made into a music album.
As a teenager growing up in Mumbai, the Kolkata-born Chaudhari used to play the guitar and sing western music songs from Bee Gees and others but soon began learning Hindustani classical when he was 16 years old. “Music has been a serious thing for me. Once I began to be known as a writer I had become discreet about the music. But in my books like the Immortals and the Afternoon Raga, the association with music was quite evident. With the convergence of my understanding of the listening to western music, the convergence of the Fusion project I became a little more upfront,” says Chaudhuri.
The author who has previously performed in India “quite a few times” was joined in his concert by members of the Amit Chaudhuri band- Pansenjit Ghosal(guitar), Raja Narayan Deb and Indrajit Dey (keyboards), Ashok Mukherjee (tabla) and Sanket Bhattarcharya and Arnab Chakraborty (bass).
The audio visuals of the “Moment of Mishearing” multimedia presentation produced by Roger James Elsgood has incorporated visuals of Chaudhuri’s Kolkata home, a hotel, images of Berlin etc.
Chaudhuri has till date written and published five novels, three works of non-fiction including his latest book “Calcutta: Two Years in the City”, a volume of poetry and has won major awards like Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Sahitya Akademi Prize. He has also cut two music albums.