Living in Los Angeles, I’ve probably heard it all – jazz fusion meets Carnatic, Hindustani meets dubstep, West Coast hip-hop meets Rabindra sangeet rap, UK underground DnB meets folk. All this presented with unique arrangements, textures and sounds, complete with videos edited from old classic Bollywood movies, giving you all the feels. Throw in some masala chai and samosas and you wouldn’t miss India one bit.
There’s a whole community of Indian artistes playing “fusion” music across venues in LA. Take my buddy, a fellow Bengalurean, Aditya Prakash for instance. He is a classic example of someone combining his jazz chops with his Carnatic training, mixing Indian ragas with a brass band with funk and global rhythm elements thrown in.
It’s almost amazing how someone can even bring in two very intricate genres together. I remember taking a train years ago to a venue in Brooklyn to watch a phenomenal sarod and tabla player jam with another group of musicians on a guitar and rock drum set to a 12 bar blues groove. Another memory is of that time in downtown LA when I saw a rapper freestyle Vedic verses with a flamenco guitarist’s finger style riffs at a little dingy bar!
Meanwhile, I’m laying low in the background as a music producer absorbing all this creativity and abundance of music without letting it overwhelm me by working with several artistes (Dolfins From Silverlake, Pocy Tac and Pastronomer to name a few) through my label, Fictitious Records.
It’s an exciting time to be in LA as an Indian working on having your voice heard through your work – You are no longer dependent on renting out major recording studios and you can make music on a laptop with all the tools at your disposal, of course with the proper training.
Even better? All this access to free thinking and classically trained musicians and the overall ambitiousness of South Asians has put us on the forefront of fusion and collaboration. If it’s already so good in 2016, I can’t wait to see what the next few years is going to look like.
– The writer is a LA based experimental electronic music producer known for blending electronic productions with live instruments and voice.
