Purbayan Chatterjee is a world-renowned Indian music maestro known for his ability to fuse traditional Indian classical music with contemporary world music genres. He was a recipient of the President of India Award for being the Best Instrumentalist in the country at the age of 15. He has also received the Aditya Vikram Birla Award for excellence and contributions to the field. He has also been honored with the Rasoi Award by Rotary International in 1995. We had the pleasure of catching up with him to discuss his career and latest star-studded album titled, ‘Unbounded- Abaad’.
Purbayan, thank you for agreeing to this interview. Is it fair to say your introduction to music was preordained? You were heir to a Hindustani classical lineage passed down from your father Partha Chatterjee (and his father’s teacher Pandit Nikhil Banerjee) but did you always have an interest in music and the arts? Note: please provide a short account of your story- how you got into film/animation and pursued it as a chosen career.
Musical education began for me at the age of 3 even before I was fully aware of what was being passed down. At that point in time, I wasn’t aware of a legacy – it was more something that was keeping me away from cricket and football. It was at the age of 12 that I acquired a passion for sitar playing through a recording of Pandit Nikhil Banerjee…… Whether to pursue music as a career was once of my greatest dilemmas as a teenager. I guess I was looking for signs which came in the form of validations from great masters like Ustad Zakir Hussain, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, later Pat Metheny, and Chick Corea too. Pursuing a predominantly classical music career through my twenties, I eventually realized in my thirties that I wanted a deep dive into the world of western harmony. My work for some of the Bollywood films in Mumbai were real eye-openers about many different elements of production. I was lucky to have people like Louis Banks and Ranjit Barot (drummer in John McLaughlin’s 4th dimension) as guiding forces in India and Ustad Zakir Hussain and Shankar Mahadevan as mentors. These masters provided me with much-needed concert opportunities and inculcated a sense of confidence in me to explore new musical horizons.
Unbounded – Abaad, is your new album via the UK-based, South Asian-focused music media platform Sufiscore. What can music lovers expect from this album?
Unbounded – Abaad is a culmination of sorts, of my wish-list of masters I have always wanted to collaborate with. I think a big thanks needs to go out to Sufiscore for bringing this kind of global music to people. The master plan for this album was approved and the go-ahead was given to me all in the matter of a 10-minute phone call. I had always been in search of a musical tether long enough to encompasses improvisational music from various parts of the world which would reach out to a larger serious global audience. Unbounded – Abaad has this common thread throughout – where the greatest of masters bring their compositional and improvisational energies to each song. Although I had composed the backbone of every song, I left enough room for masters like Ustad Zakir Hussain, Bela Fleck, Antonio Sanchez, Thana Alexa, Gary Husband to bring in their song-writing genius into every song. The harmonic complexities of chromatic jazz meet Indan ragas in a potpourri of musical milieus. In the song, Khula Asmaan – Firmament, Jordan Rudess of Dream Theatre has written a 32 bar section that takes the listener from the bliss of Sufi Music to the high of progressive rock. In “Sukoon – Catharsis” Thana Alexa has composed choral harmonies and done a chromatic jazz scat on a Ghazal sung by Gayathri Asokan. In Lalita – The Joyful Mother, Bela Fleck has taken the full-throated Mame Khan’s vocals (from an organic Indian musical culture) and juxtaposed it with the quirks of Country Jazz even when Shankar Mahadevan’s lilting melody has been provided groovy backing by Michael League of “Snarky Puppy”. I am very excited to hear the audience’s reaction to this coming together – but if initial reactions are anything to go by, we are very upbeat.
The album features musicians of the highest caliber, from across several genres. Alongside eminent Indian artists, the project includes Banjo pioneer Béla Fleck (whose duo work with the late Chick Corea was formative for Chatterjee); keyboardist Jordan Rudess of the progressive metal band Dream Theater; longtime Pat Metheny drummer Antonio Sanchez; Snarky Puppy bassist and founder Michael League; and acclaimed jazz clarinetist Anat Cohen. How easy was it to assemble this collaboration?
This album has masters from 8 different time zones. So I am going to start by telling you about all of the odd hours we had to keep just to get everybody on Zoom. We have hours of BTS footage which we intend to share with listeners very soon. Fortunately, we live in a world where virtual is getting more and more real…….We have ways of connecting to each other’s Logic X sessions and listening in real-time to someone tracking from halfway across the world. Often a song would start on the Logic on the laptop of whiz-kid Nakul Chugh and travel to Bela Fleck then to Guy Bernfeld then to Ustad Zakir Hussain and so on and so forth – then we’d have to repeat this entire process till everyone felt satisfied. I remember this one time we had a Zoom call with Antonio and Thana and we were discussing how they preferred their charts to be written by Guy. Eventually, although Guy wrote pretty detailed charts, we did leave a lot open for interpretation with the masters and we specifically wanted their vision on the songs.
The album was mixed by Aditya Srinivasan at Seven Heaven Studios, mastered by Christian Wright at Abbey Road Studios in London, and mixed for Dolby Atmos by Sethuraman Kuppaiyandi, again at Seven Heaven. Was the production of this project a particularly long process, particularly due to the COVID pandemic?
We’ve had the privilege of having Sethuraman ji and Aditya who are certainly top-notch engineers in India. Christian was extremely kind and co-operating in the mastering process and he did mention how much fun he had working on this album. Despite the devastation of the COVID pandemic (with many of us losing dear colleagues and friends even as we were working on this album) we didn’t want to give our listeners anything short of the best when it came to the final output. Yes, we did have to be patient and often brave (I remember being very edgy when I was traveling to track Ustad Rashid Khan) but we never lost sight of what we wanted to achieve.
Are you currently working on any other projects?
I am working on a very interesting compilation of sitar-based background scores for Hollywood scores in collaboration with Sashwat Sachdev. This work is being done for Hans Zimmer’s company and we hope to get these sounds out so that the sitar and other Indian sounds get a bigger place under the sun in Hollywood.
Where can people find out more about you?
The best place would be to visit my social media
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/purbayan.sitar
- Instagram: https://Instagram.com/purbayanch
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Stringstruck
Photo Credit: Amarbir Singh
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