Debashish Bhattacharya – Live In Calcutta (Digital Only)

This excellent album comprises recordings taken from an all-night live concert in Calcutta; the 2003 Dover Lane Music Festival. The festival is renowned for hosting India’s finest musicians, a star studded pantheon within which Debashish takes a prize place. The hushed tones and thoughtful improvisatory passages of the opening track, ‘Ragu Maru Bihag Alaap’ highlight Debashish’s masterful use of his innovative slide guitars.

True to the Indian concert tradition the album follows an arc of activity: from the slow brooding opening to heightened dance-like themes to intricate percussive interplay, followed by a slow wind down before the shimmering, sparkling finale, ‘Anandam In Anandi [Raga: Mishra Shivaranjani]’. In the last track Debashish’s multiple international influences are manifest as he performs scalic gestures that could sound equally at home in a down-home blues number, as they do in an extended raga.  

Debashish plays two instruments from his self-designed ‘Trinity of Guitars’ on this album; the chaturangui and anandi. The ‘Trinity’ as a whole – chaturangui, gandharvi and anandi – represent three generations of instruments, while also continuing a thousand-year tradition of music. The novel instrumentation combined with Debashish’s original three-finger picking technique makes for a uniquely complex sound world. Rippling tablaaccompaniment is provided on this album by the masterful Subhasis Bhattacharjee. Download this excellent digital album today and allow yourself to be immersed deep into a world of Indian inspiration and improvisation.