MUSIC: Neil Spencer
‘YOU have to be careful – you can suddenly find yourself tied in with Liberty’s new range of Indian cushions,” reflects Talvin Singh with a grimace. Tabla player, DJ, club promoter and now label boss, Singh is talking up his new compilation album, Anokha: Sounds of the Asian Underground (released by Omni/Mango Records in February), while talking down its connections to the current upsurge of young Anglo-Asian culture.
It’s easy to understand Singh’s concern. What with Kula Shaker turning Vedic chants into chart hits, Babylon Zoo’s Jas Mann becoming the first Indian in space, Birmingham’s Bally Sagoo on Top of the Pops and hosting a show for MTV Asia, and fashion house Red or Dead unveiling a “Bollywood” spring collection of cheesecloth and saris, the smell of incense is currently permeating pop culture in a way it hasn’t since the Beatles discovered kaftans and sitars.
The 27-year-old Singh, however, is wary of becoming part of this season’s novelty phenomenon. For one thing, he’s a classically trained musician, having left his native Leytonstone at the age of 15 to spend two years studying in the Punjab. In the years since, he’s ducked and dived his way through bhangra, jazz, hip-hop and Indian classical music, amassing an awesome list of playing credits en route. Among others, he’s hammered his tablas for Bjrk, Massive Attack, Courtney Pine and even the late American jazz giant Sun Ra, who dedicated a tune, Singh’s Thing, to his accompanist.
“Jazz was an open door for me,” he says, “the only music that allowed me the freedom I wanted.” These days, Singh finds his freedom in a giddy blend of Indian and Western influences in which the fizz and the boom of drum’n’bass collides with tabla breakbeats and Indian raggas. Anokha, the club night he hosts at London’s Blue Note every Monday, has helped redefine Anglo- Asian identity with an aesthetic that is carried over to the Anokha album, a compilation of names such as State of Bengal and Future Soundz of India. Singh’s own album is also under construction.
“People call the music that we make a fusion of several elements,” says Singh, “but as people we already are those elements – we’re already fused!”
Certainly the music on Anokha represents a leap forward from the sometimes crude weld of Western rhythms and Eastern melodies you find on the “world rave” circuit: a reflection, in part, of Singh’s knowledge of Indian tradition. For him, the East is a fact of life rather than a piece of borrowed exotica.
The same, of course, is true for India itself, which has taken to the new hybrids emerging from the old imperial homeland with a gusto that explains why major labels are now pricking up their commercial ears.
A clear sign of shifting attitudes is that Amar, a 17-year-old female vocalist discovered in Southall by Singh and Bjrk, and who sings the beguiling Jaan that opens Anokha, has just been snapped up by Warners.
“I’ve never wanted to make music whose only outlet would be through Asian shops,” says Talvin Singh, “or to be filed under world music. “I want to feel I could make an Indian classical record and have it in the pop section. I just want to be filed under A for Anokha.