Jazz breaking news: Amit Chaudhuri To Showcase New Album At Rich Mix

This exclusive airing of the new record with the Amit Chaudhuri Band is the second performance of the DSC South Asian Literature Festival following Monday night’s album launch at Charlotte Street Blues.

Released on Monday by the Babel Vortex label, the label that released Portico Quartet's debut album, Found Music takes its name and concept from the art world, the equivalent of placing existing objects into fresh and often incongruous contexts and arrangements to give them new artistic identity.

Being something of a creative chameleon – Chaudhuri is a critically acclaimed novelist, poet and Hindustani classical singer, as well as non-fiction writer, lecturer, and critic – it’s understandable that eclecticism should be a major feature of his latest release.

With his debut album This Is Not Fusion, Chaudhuri fashioned a distinctive sound that resisted easy definition – in keeping with his own musical manifesto that the record was “not fusion”. A blurring of the boundaries between both the Indian classical and Western popular traditions, laced with Chaudhuri’s trademark musical “disorientation, discontinuity, and surprise”, the resulting style is an exploratory interweaving of raga, jazz, rock, Americana and blues.

The audience at Rich Mix, one of London’s up-and-coming arts centres set on the Bethnal Green Road, can expect some fantastic Indianised re-imaginings of pop songs. But whatever you do, don’t mention the ‘F’ word.

– Ben Davies

For more info go to www.richmix.org.uk