Glasgow-based saxophonist Brian Molley has forged strong links with India. His quartet’s previous album, Intercontinental, released in 2022, was a collaboration with percussionist Krishna Kishor, who recorded his contributions remotely in Chennai due to the covid epidemic.
This latest release finds Molley’s group fully immersed, working with a quartet of leading Rajasthani traditional musicians in a custom-built studio in the western Rajasthani desert.
It’s a productive and rewarding relationship as both sets of musicians are able to express themselves in their own musical languages and to interact with one another, trading phrases, combining on extended melodies and improvising together with a genuinely mutual understanding.
Asin Langa is a marvellously agile, soulful vocalist and a master of the sarangi, the three-string, bowed instrument that gives the album a very distinctive quality. His fellow Rajasthanis bring various drums and percussion instruments including the khartal, a wooden clapper, and the jew’s harp-like morchang to the ensemble sound.
The effect can be both sedate and animated as the music flows between Molley’s essentially melodic compositions and the variously loping and supercharged rhythms. The opening Cottonpolis/Dhologee combines a groove reminiscent of Molley’s youthful interest in Manchester’s indie music scene with a lilting traditional Rajasthani song and features typically concise tenor saxophone phrasing as all eight musicians drive towards the coda.
Kama finds Molley operating as a fifth member of Langa’s group, luxuriating in its folk song melody, and Journeys in Hand in Hand, a track originally found on Molley’s second album and redolent of Indian music melodically, features the superb Tom Gibbs digging in on piano as the two groups resume their conversation.
Gibbs is also to the fore on Parapraxis/Livar Jivaro, another Scottish-Rajasthani medley that features a wonderfully intense vocal from Langa and a full-bodied call and response between Molley’s tenor and Langa’s sarangi. These tracks, along with Two City Tales, which depicts the musicians’ respective hometowns of Glasgow and Jodhpur with contrasting characteristics and strong interaction, represent a musical relationship that works very effectively and sounds as if it has much more still to be discovered.
Journeys is released today 7 February 2025
