What Makes the Blues? Arinjoy Sarkar On Music, Kolkata And The Arinjoy Trio

Hyderabad: His mother had no idea what she was starting. He had pointed at the television at Led Zeppelin, probably, or the Eagles, one of those nights when MTV played something that cut through the usual static of the Backstreet Boys. She went out and bought him two albums — Hell Freezes Over and Led Zeppelin IV.

“I couldn’t get enough of it,” says Arinjoy Sarkar. He pushed every pop CD aside and that was it. That was the beginning.

More than two decades and several major blues festivals later, Sarkar is in Hyderabad for the first time, performing at Windmills Craftworks. In a sense, he is preparing to do for a room full of strangers what those two albums did for him as a teenager in Kolkata — to give them something they didn’t know they needed.

The Arinjoy Trio, which features Sarkar on guitar and vocals, Sounak Roy on drums and Aakash Ganguly on bass, is one of India’s most recognised blues acts. They have been together since 2015, the year Sarkar decided it was time to stop circling the music and fully immerse himself in it. Before that, he spent eight years playing in a Bengali band, and before that he was a boy in Kolkata learning his way through Backstreet Boys songs, Enrique Iglesias and the mainstream pop of the late 1990s.

It is a route familiar to many who grew up around television channels, cassette tapes and whatever music happened to be within reach.

“The blues is very primal and very raw and very fundamental,” Sarkar said at one point. He did not feel the need to dress the idea up any further. A few minutes later, he returned to the same thought in another way: “If you can sing the blues after a tough day, it’s therapy.” Between those two lines sat almost everything he had to say about the music he has devoted himself to, the trio he has built around it, and the listening life that made such a band possible.

People often tell these stories as if taste arrives fully formed, but Sarkar’s did not. He describes it as a gradual widening — one sound leading to another, one teacher opening the door to an older lineage. When the conversation turned to Amyt Datta, one of Kolkata’s most renowned guitarists and Sarkar’s teacher, he said, “I call Amyt Datta my musical parent. He was the one who first taught me the blues and my exposure to music increased tenfold because of him.”

Sarkar later had the opportunity to play with him as well. Datta heard him perform and asked if he would like to join him on his own music. “I was like, I’ve been waiting for this,” Sarkar recalled.

That mix of inheritance and accident, of self-discovery and shared company, runs through almost everything he says about Kolkata. The city, in his telling, offered a particular way of listening. “Back then it was easier to come together for a shared listening experience,” he said. “I tell my students they are missing out on those shared experiences. Music today can feel very isolated.”

Kolkata, at least during the years that shaped him, offered the opposite. Blues and jazz had a public life. There were musicians to watch, arguments to have, and records to pass around. “That is very important to inculcate a certain musical sensibility in any city,” he said.

When it comes to building a life in music, Sarkar does not romanticise hardship either. “I’ve never depended on live performances for income,” he said. “My main income comes from teaching guitar.” Teaching, in his view, provides both a livelihood and something more lasting.

The trio also has new work ahead. A blues legend from the United States is set to record harmonica for one of their versions of his song. “If all goes well, you should hear it in a couple of months,” he said.