Nitin Sawhney "Beyond Skin" (1999)
Another interesting, multi-faceted creative type. Sawhney studied
piano, guitar, sitar and tabla. He toured with the group the James
Taylor Quartet, formed his own band, the Jazztones, then joined forces
with Talvin Singh (entry 875) to create the Tihai Trio.
Sawhney joined up with an old university friend Sanjeev Baskhar to write
a comedy radio show that eventually became the brilliant tv programme
"Goodness Gracious Me". Sawhney also continued with his music.
The Talvin Singh connection made me expect that this would be another
album in the 'Asian Underground' sub-genre, but that's not the case at
all. The first track "Broken Skin"
sounds like a pretty straight-ahead bit of soulful pop, albeit with
chants in the middle section. Another track features what sounds like
Southern American music. On the whole it wouldn't be unfair to label
the album 'world music', but not in some pigeonholing or dismissive way,
more because it feels like whole world is capture here through differing
genres, instrumentation and musical ethnicity!
"Serpents" and "the Conference"
both feature enjoyably speedy rhythmic vocal and percussion sounds
playing off against each other. "Nadia" would fit broadly into the Asian
Underground category. "Nostalgia" is another somewhat poppy track.
There is a theme running through about nuclear weapons. Beyond this, in the album liner notes Sawhney stated:
"I believe in Hindu philosophy. I am not religious. I am a
pacifist. I am a British Asian. My identity and my history are defined
only by myself - beyond politics, beyond nationality, beyond religion
and Beyond Skin."
No comments:
Post a Comment