Suckers for projects with thematic hooks need look no further than this Bengali slide whiz's Hawaii To Calcutta to get their appetites whetted and pulse increasing. Debashish Bhattacharya's is a project bristling with barbs. At its heart it taps into one of the least reported intercultural/intercontinental musical love affairs to touch Raj-era India's sensibilities. Rachel Jackson's informative liner notes reveal that Tau Moe (pronounced Mo-ay) and his recent bride Rose supposedly joined Mme Riviere's Hawaiians and played engagements in the Dutch East Indies, Raj-era India, Japan and elsewhere in that Asian geographical realm. …A little polyglot internet searching suggests this was an ensemble founded by Mme Claude Riviere in Honolulu as an outgrowth of her interests in Polynesian music, for which the Moe Family with their mixture of Samoan and Hawaiian fitted her entrepreneurial and cultural aspirations beautifully. Touring straddled the 1920s and 1930s. In India the Hawaiian guitar detonated a powder trail of musical sensibilities, for example in popular music with the Aloha Boys and later the early flowerings of Hawaiian guitar adapted for Hindustani light classical performances, notably with Bhattacharya's teacher Brij Bhushan Kabra, one third of the triumvirate that recorded The Call of the Valley, the most successful Hindustani release ever, given it alone among Indian releases has never gone out of catalogue. Bouncing off Bhattacharya meeting Tau Moe (1908-2004), the impressionistic Hawaii To Calcutta is a musical narrative detailing Bhattacharya's extended journey, one sustained over several years, into a world where hybrids abound and musical inventiveness such as ‘Anandi On The Loose’ and the improvisation-rich ‘Papa Tau’ get triggered. Here he is assisted by Hawaiian musicians. The whole shebang ends with a boisterous ‘Kana I Ka Huahua'i’ (or ‘Hawaiian War Chant’). This project is an upliftingly inspirational Indian start to 2017.