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A 60-year-old pradhan from Garhwal sings with a chorus of villagers about goddesses bathing in the Ganga; a 12-year-old tribal girl sings an old temple song on the blue mountains of the Nilgiris; a 30-year-old housewife from Mizoram chants a gospel hymn. Amit Heri, the jazz guitarist who lapped up some praise for his compositions in the movie Morning Raga, is trying an unusual fusion in his new album Jhula: A World Music Yatra (Music Today). The 38-year-old brings together little-known folk music from remote parts of the country and layers it with jazz and Carnatic music.
“I have tried to capture the rawness of different folk sounds and blend it with my own modern interpretation of it,” says Heri, who travelled to villages near the Himalayas, the border hamlets of Kerala and the Northeast and the tribal heart of Central India for the nine-track album. Some of the folk melodies are part of the vast oral tradition of the country. He has contemporised them with a liberal use of the guitar, drums and the keyboard, and sometimes even stylised it with his trademark Carnatic style. “Not many people have heard these songs before. I have tried to make them relevant and find them a place in mainstream world music,” says Heri, who graduated from the Berklee College of Music and has performed at international festivals like the Berlin Jazz Festival, London Jazz Festival and the Rome World Music Festival
Heri admits he does not comprehend all the languages and dialects in his album, but that was never a big problem. “I could grasp the tune and the people would translate the gist of the song for me,” says Heri.