7.00-8.15pm, Tuesday 17 October, 2023, Edinburgh College of Art, West Court. Hosted by the UNESCO Week of Sound in collaboration with the James Tait Black Visiting Writers Programme and the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures

Amit Chaudhuri will be performing compositions from a celebrated musical-conceptual project he started as a composer, vocalist, and improviser in 2005, which he called, in its early days, ‘not fusion’. The first of his three recordings in the project was actually called This is Not Fusion (2007); the second Found Music (2010), borrowing from the term ‘found object’; and the third, Across the Universe, was released this year. Of it, Peter Culshaw said in Songlines and Gramophone magazines: ‘The way he destroys boundaries is liberating, a triumph of free-thinking’.

Chaudhuri does not believe in static entities (in music or otherwise) called ‘Western’ or ‘Indian’ tradition. As a result, his repertoire, which brings together ragas, jazz standards, the blues scale, pop and rock classics, urban soundscapes and texts, techno, American folk, Hindi film songs, and Western classical music, depends on accidentality and the idea of bricolage rather than that of ‘fusion’. ‘Not-fusion’ music, both formally and conceptually, is a critique of a multicultural, or syncretic, or hybrid model of creative practice, and of assumptions to do with music being a universal language. Instead, it is interested in all sound – both musical and non-musical – as having the potential to enter the space of composition. This is a project in which Chaudhuri’s various practices, as writer, critic, and musician, come together.

Chaudhuri will be joined by Adam Moore on guitar, Matt Hodges on piano/keyboards, and Oliver Jarvis on saxophone.

Amit Chaudhuri is a leading novelist, essayist, poet, and musician. Among the prizes his fiction and non-fiction have received are the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the Government of India’s Sahitya Akademi Award, the Infosys Prize, and the James Tait Black Prize. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

His North Indian classical recordings were first released in the 1990s by HMV in India; his experiments in ‘not fusion’, in which he brought jazz, blues, and other kinds music together with the raga, were released by Times Music and EMI in India, and Babel Label in the UK. The second CD in this genre, Found Music, was on allaboutjazz.com’s Editor’s Picks for 2010. ‘Summertime’, from his first album, was one of the versions of Gershwin’s composition featured on BBC 4’s Gershwin’s Summertime: The Song that Conquered the World. He has also been a featured artist on various flagship UK radio and TV shows, including Loose Ends and BBC 2’s Review Show.

He wrote the libretto for Ravi Shankar’s opera, Sukanya, and sang and read from his work in 2019 as part of the finale of the London Review of Book’s 40th anniversary celebrations at Queen Elizabeth Hall.

The West Bengal government conferred the Sangeet Samman on him for his contribution to North Indian classical music in 2018.

His book, Finding the Raga (2021), about his relationship with North Indian classical music, won the James Tait Black Prize in 2022.

Tickets available via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/amit-chaudhuri-this-is-not-fusion-tickets-722092818057. Week of Sound programme available here: http://www.weekofsound.scot/

Share