Two years in the making, and 22 years since their last album, Saturday Night In Bombay, Shakti's latest album, This Moment, is their finest achievement yet. It is also quite different to any of the Shakti and Remember Shakti albums that preceded it. It marks the successful integration of Shankar Mahadevan's voice within the ensemble, brings Konokol [essentially the art of performing percussion syllables vocally in South Indian Carnatic music] forward as a central element of their performance, introduces atmospheric guitar synth washes and features some stunning guitar and guitar synth playing by John McLaughlin. For the avoidance of doubt, ‘stunning’ in this context is not mere hyperbole, but as in the dictionary definition of the word, “extremely impressive”.

If you are not familiar with the concept of Konokol, then you will discover exactly what it is all about after getting into this remarkable album, played with such a high degree of musicianship it seems beyond the realm of mere mortals.

Mahadevan, whose day job is singer and composer and one third of the Shankar–Ehsaan–Loy trio that writes music for Indian films (they have done some 50 or 60 films), has, by any standards, a remarkable voice, something endorsed by his countrymen: he has sold some 50 million records.

On this album his voice soars and flies in a way that is totally mesmerising. Together with McLaughlin's guitar and guitar synth and Ganesh Rajagopalan's violin, the trio are the central voices that make this an album both of extraordinary beauty and endearing complexity. McLaughlin's western heritage shows him integrating the well-tempered scale and the harmonies that flow from it into to the harmony implied by raga, and at one point even weaving a couple of mischievous blue notes into the flow, while Mahadevan's voice, steeped in the complexities of Konokol, goes beyond anything heard before in jazz, with moments that can only be described as ‘high-tech scat’. This is my Album of the Year, since it is one of the finest albums of the last quarter-century.