The Infernal Diurnal Journal

Yesterday was the first meeting of the  Hoichoi  Music team for 2024. I invited not the full team, but most of the team to discuss the concept and the music arrangement ideas. I must admit I was  underwhelemed . This is also a learning experience for me wherein I have participated in this type of deal before in Singapore- which is to say working with a team on Bengali artistes to put on a show for a Bengali audience. The problem is I have only been a participant at best, and a relatively peripheral one at that. The last such format I was a part of was back in 2013 when I had played my  Korg  M50 Synth to a program of recitation and  rabindrasangeet  led by this one harridan Bengali woman whose name now escapes me. We had  myself  on synth, someone on  Tabla  and an ace on Sitar. The main idea was recitation performed by the lead herself- with a background score on synth improvised by me. Interspersed within this recitation piece wer...

I received a call today from the organizing committee of BCD requesting me to lead the Music section of an upcoming annual ritual organized by them called Hoichoi- which is a variety entertainment cultural program consisting of a Dance section, a Drama  section  and a Music section. Now, usually I think people who  had  in previous years taken the lead in the Music section have essentially resorted to choosing singers and songs and the sequence. Rarely has the music been of particular concern- in fact in the previous year there were  a number of  Rabindra Sangeet songs delivered with a pre-recorded track. I am not even sure who created those tracks- I would suspect they were obtained from the internet. I could not be bothered with just selecting singers and sequencing songs- although I suspect this is what everyone expects. This becomes a platform where everyone wants to showcase their singing talent and therefore wants to perform something that they alread...