April 26 2024

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 already have in mind. I plan to approach this rather differently- and I have no idea how this is going to go. As far as I can recall, I have never been asked to do something like this before. Given that I do not seek such activities out, I think they gave it to me partially because they know I am musically inclined, (I did perform a duet with Tilo last Puja) but mostly because it was a thankless and painful job and someone had to be thrown the pork chop. I view it as an opportunity though. I have always wanted a place to showcase some degree of my creativity. Musically, I have done this while being a part of Jhalmuri in Singapore a decade ago. Therein, I arranged some traditional Bengali songs for a band and played some keyboard sequences that were not usual. In particular I ended the famous Bela Bose song with an instrumental finale that curiously ended on a B dim chord- lets say it ended very unusually. I got a mention on how cool that sounded- so I took that to be somewhat of a validation for my little creative license on this song. Another bigger hit was my arrangement of  “ Jibone ki Pabona”- another evergreen classic in which I incorporated a piano riff inspired by Donald Fagen’s work with Steely Dan. I also made the really famous bridge, I think even more memorable by putting an 8 chord transition where 2 would have done. The additional voicing options then made it a great opportunity for a harmony vocal line to go with the more complex voicing. I particularly was proud of this treatment, I think it kicked the song up a few notches. I wasn’t expecting to be lauded for it, because the audience by and large are consumers of music and not musicians themselves. However, the song was so well-received that there were encore pleas from all quarters. I took that as validation of my creativity also. However, truth be told, I had always been far more ambitious than this. I wanted to perform originals, wherein I would write lyrics and compose the music. Being a Bengali band posed some obvious hurdles since my grasp of Bengali is not mature enough to be lyric writing- not by a fair distance. I still did though. For one, I made a tune called “Jhalmuri”, which I visualized to be an introduction to the band , to be performed by the eponymous band. Aside of this there was one called “Mon” and another called “Udashi Haowa (Chhuti)”- for which I had obtained lyrics from a rather enigmatic middle-aged woman called Debjani Bose. For Mon I had a funk track and I had to add a couple of lines to fulfil the chorus I had in mind. I recorded a demo just with my vocals. For the other one, I had Ari ( Jhalmuri’s brilliant vocalist) record it. I shared the latter with Debjani- who gave us the go-ahead to perform it as a Jhalmuri song. One thing led to another just around this time- we had a fallout with the second vocalist who was asked to leave ( more on this later) and had to change the guitar player who wanted to be paid. During this turbulence, these originals simply disappeared from our collective radars. Having said that, Jhalmuri suffered from not having anyone lead it. I tried to but in my own non-violent way- and it was also evident that there were other members not willing to have a “leader”- I have mentioned elsewhere that life-lessons from being in a band are almost infinite as it condenses all the pathological conditions of humanity into a bite-sized microcosm, so to speak. As a result, somehow I could not get any enthusiasm amongst my other bandmates save Ari to pursue originals. Ofcourse the band turbulence in 2012 did not help but I think it was unlikely we would have ever performed these even with the original line-up intact. Aside of these, I wrote a song called “Ipshita”- which was heavily influenced by a Dutch progressive rock tune ( and maybe to a lesser extent an ex-flame of a friend from college) which I am sure no one has heard before. So in the Annu Malik vein, I put something together. I had recorded it on my desktop in Singapore which at the time used to run REAPER as the music production software. I think it was 3 or 4 tracks only, and the result was good enough to convert it into a live performance. It was a standard rock back beat with no major variations, so it should have been easy to perform as well. And yet, we never did. Maybe I didn’t end up sharing the tune widely with the band, and maybe they did not care for it. My memory is fuzzy on the matter. However, recently while rummaging old files stored on my google drive, this showed up out of nowhere. I must have heard it after 12 long years, and frankly it sounded quite fresh and interesting. As I continue my stop-start journey in music production, this is another tune that now goes into the birth-chute queue as I get better at this stuff. This is extremely gruelling, boring work- very far cry from composing a tune which is a lot of fun. I can imagine any production is the same- whether it is producing creative work or metal castings. The guy that designs the item is proverbially far-removed from the production- in fact this leads to many production problems.  In the music industry, I am aware of Frank Zappa being one of these creative personalities that was known for writing music that was near impossible to perform by human beings. In art, one of the harshest realisations is that it is not the complexity of the work that matters but whether it manages to captivate large swathes of people’s imaginations.  It is clear that if the goal is to captivate a large group, one has to pursue the lowest common denominator- which tends to exclude complexity of any kind. The problem with this is that the barriers to entry are very low- one can often cook up a mundane chicken curry that can outperform the Michelin Chef equivalent.On the other hand, if you want to captivate a smaller more curated group well then you can be freer. And the latter is my goal-before I die, whatever creative ability I have musically simply must show itself for no particular reason and to fulfil no particular agenda. There is no desire to become famous ( well maybe a little ) and certainly not rich ( and this is 100% true). But if it never comes out, I will have left carrying too much baggage. When it comes time for me to leave, I would like to travel as light as possible.​​