Nashen Moodley
The first time I heard a Joi track was on an album of remixes. The RealWorld release, Star Rise, featured the songs of Qawwali legend, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and Michael Brook, remixed by young British Asians including Talvin Singh, Asian Dub Foundation, Aki Nawaz, Nitin Sawhney and Joi. The collection opens with Joi’s staggering polyrhythmic reworking, Sweet Pain Remix.
The group of artists that worked on Star Rise, and others beside, were labelled the “Asian Underground”. Since the release of Star Rise the movement has been anything but underground, with Talvin Singh’s OK winning the Mercury Prize and Nitin Sawhney’s Beyond Skin and the Asian Dub Foundation’s Rafi’s Revenge and Community Music receiving almost unanimous critical acclaim and commercial success.
Originally consisting of brothers Haroon and Farook Shamsher, Joi are considered by many to be pioneers of the sound that has now gone decidedly overground. They started experimenting with a fusion of traditional Asian forms with more conventional dance and hip-hop a decade ago with the Joi Bangla sound system.
The band’s long association with Womad culminated last year with the release of their debut album, the innovative and ground-breaking One and One Is One through the RealWorld label. Sadly, Haroon Sham-sher passed away last year. His brother has continued with the creation of eclectic sounds and is presently working on Joi’s second album for RealWorld.
I caught up with Farook Sham-sher between tours. He had just returned from a trip to Bangladesh where he had played a gig to 500 street children and was off to France for a Joi Sound System tour the next day. Along with the term Asian Underground comes a supposed homogenous musical and political ethos. I asked Shamsher if he was comfortable with being lumped together in this group.
“I don’t really agree with the term at all; the music is not all underground and it’s not a very new thing at all. People like Ananda Shankar, L Shankar and Sheila Chandra have been experimenting with fusion for years. I think the reason that it took so long for Asian fusion to become known was that people just didn’t know how to categorise it,” Shamsher says.
For Shamsher the music that Joi creates is not trendist or contrived, but rather a completely natural consequence of their eclectic upbringing. “It’s not that we’ve decided that now that Asian music is popular we’ll release an album. Fortunately we were influenced by our father, a traditional Bengali flautist, and by being born and brought up in the United Kingdom. It was inevitable for me and my brother that we would create this sort of music.”
In many ways Joi’s long-term association with Womad is just as natural as the music they create; traditionally Bengali music is characterised as tribal travelling music. While the Joi Sound System features live mixing, online sampling, live percussion and MC-ing, the Joi we will experience at Womad 2000 will be a full-on live performance featuring a vocalist, former Stone Roses guitarist Aziz Ebrahim, a Bengali classical dancer and a Moroccan percussionist. “We just enjoy ourselves on stage,” says Shamsher, “We try to create an Asian vibe but we also show off different musicians and artists while trying to show the oneness of music.”