Niladri Kumar

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Sitar has had a long association with the family of Niladri Kumar. It has been an integral part of his family for the past four generations. His father is the famous Pandit Kartick Kumar, one of the great masters of the Garana Senia, one of the most famous Hindustani high schools in the Northern part of India. The young Bengali boy was taught most of what he knows from his father. He was able to play the instrument at the age of four, and he played before a live audience less than two years later in an ashram in Pondichery. Soon enough the young child who was born in 1973 in Calcutta became much more proficient in the instrument and has truly become a professional that has gained evryone's admiration. Sixteen years after his professional debut at the beginning of the 90’s, and now in his 30’s, he shows a rare technique and mastery of all the styles that has made him one the best virtuosos on this legendary instrument. You can hear the proof by listening to his albums dedicated to the rags “Kaunsi Kanada” and “Bilaskhani Todi”.Nevertheless, far from just becoming a contemporary of the formulas that his elders taught him, Niladri Kumar has developed his own phrasing, that is more in keeping with the legitimate pursuits of the musicians of today. This means he had to go through a world of music, and master all the esthetical frontiers. We could listen to him perform in the company of Zakir Hussain, a Tablas player, whose career has been such an inspiring motivation for other players when he invited the young master to the Indian millennium to participate in this great musical experience , and has performed with the Swedish bass player, Jonas Hellborg, an apostle of punk jazz that now has been converted to Indian Music…Besides those two masters, there is a very long list of people whose name has been associated with Niladri Kumar. Just for the record, we can mention Anu Malik and Ar Rahman, two famous writers of original soundtracks, Sarangi player Sabir Khan, the percussion player Selvaganesh and the flute player Rakesh Chaurasia, two instrumentalists who act more or less in the same way as Niladri, they defy all boundries to the musical experience. The defining motivation of this guy, who can counts as many admirers in traditional Pandits than in new young producers in the very fashion mood of the hindi electro scene, is to enlarge the spectrum of possibilities.“An accomplished instrument player must be a soloist, but also a musician who is able to put himself at the service of a leader of the collective groove. Because the exchange that is implicite in this is the essential value of all music even if I am a great admirer of the great soloists of Hindustany music, a tradition in which I am totally involved.” said Nidrani Kumar in 2005. At that time, he just had published “Forever”, a collection that showed his wilingness to make innovations in the traditional classical Indian music, adding some electronic touches to it. He carries on in this way with the habitual sounds with “Zitar”, a kind of loud-sounding long and complicated journey recorded in Mumbai. The magnified sounds inside the Indian megalopolis re-echo straight to the listeners, who are immersed in this chamber like surrounding, and drawn to a long solo of electrified sitar which is flying away on a carpet made of Tablas with outlines of drum’n’bass . Now you have the tone : the compositions and variations due to Niladri Kamar, with the impressive programming by Aggi Fernandes, the machine man and alter ego of the sitar man for this project. They succeeded in joining together, at their sides, an ensemble of instrumentalists, including the subtle bansuri flute of K Srinivasan, to which the slender voice of June Banerjee responds on ‘Iris Peg’, an electro acoustic dream that flirts with the pop of the great divas in Hollywood. The next theme, ‘Babur comes to India’, works itself out of the dialogs between the sitar effects and the sounds effects produced by the programming, a mix as much unlikely and unstoppable around which some voices graft themselves under vocoder or sampler, and lead to a powerful crescendo, that concludes in a perfect serenity … and announces the competent atmosphere to evoce the glaze of the famous ‘Taj Mahal’, a composition where Niladri Kumar plays the acoustical sitar and then the electrical zitar, in a kind of garland of colorful key notes with pieces of bamboo flutes, some parts of trumpet…. Then again the saturated sounds of the big city shatter, the Tablas and trafficked sitars rise and act in an astonishing contrast with the charming accents of the voice of Sanjeev Abhyankar, and much more with the languishing ballad that is the next tune, ‘Love September’, discoid soul, surmounted by post-psychedelic pearls… Such a corded deep sensuality can live in the sarangui of ‘Liplocked’, that should fill the curiosities of lovers with admiration, such as the whole ‘Zitar’ who alternates peaceful moments and heady take offs. And the conclusion comes with a major tune whose title, ‘Zilebration’, is a final celebration of this electric choc between cultures, that invites the zebra zitar to converse with an eclectic guitar, both boosted by the telluric rhythms born from the encounter between machines and percussions.Jacques DENIS