The critic’s first duty in reviewing a record, book or other artwork is to explain for the reader what the work is and how it might be approached. Her/his second duty is to assess its value in the contexts of the artist’s intentions and of the wider art-culture-social frame. Tommy Khosla and JAWARI’s ROAD RASA poses for this critic a couple of difficulties. To begin with the first of these tasks, ROAD RASA’s sheer eclecticism – purposeful, intentional and coherent eclecticism that is – requires that I provide some kind of list of musical signposts that must ultimately miss the point. As to the second of my duties, I really just want to cut to the chase and tell you how beautiful and how successfully executed this music is.
Please bear with me as I provide the obligatory signpost or two. Tommy Khosla is a sitarist, able to draw upon both Hindustānī music and jazz. JAWARI is multinational and multicultural collective, bringing together in their personalities and tastes the musics of North India, Columbia, North Africa and the Middle East, China and jazz with an ease that belies their years.
Tommy Khosla’s first release, Vignettes, was quite different being essentially a solo affair. Yet, both records share the imagery of movement and travel. Where Vignettes was like a series of short films, ROAD RASA is more a series of postcards from a musical and personalised journey. That sense of meaning and purpose is further heightened through the highly affective and effective use of the spoken poetry of Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay (Nashville’s first Youth Poet Laureate) and the range of instruments, voices and influences that pervade the music. This is a music rich in texture, in every respect.
Now, I could tell you that you will hear the influences of Chinese folk and art music on “or else, wandering 千”(qiān translates to “thousand” in Chinese), as the sounds of guzheng and sitar combine over a steady bass obligato and washes of synth. I could say that I hear both Bollywood and Kurt Weill on “Sakura 桜” ( translates to “cherry blossom” in Japanese) and suspect that Brecht would have loved this record. Fanciful? Wait till you hear it and the way it plays with genre whilst respecting the origins of each element in the music through the care of its creation. But, then, the real point is the whole that combines all these parts so seamlessly. Do I have a favourite track, one that perhaps encapsulates the group and its music? Well, today it’s “moves চলো” (cholo translates to “let’s go” in Bengali) in the way it brings North Indian and Latin American musics and jazz together so perfectly that even these arthritic hips can’t help but sway. Yesterday it was “RASA रसः” for the way its gentle acoustic guitar opening builds to a crescendo behind Khosla’s sitar. Tomorrow, my affections may well be elsewhere, as I listen again.
It has been some time since I felt chills down my spine like this listening to a new release. ROAD RASA should be in every Christmas stocking.
