Castle 2026
A Family Business
Reframing their riffs and licks, French collective take fiery blend of pancontinental motifs to an entirely new level of fantasy.
There’s nothing new under the sun, of course, yet cooking things up by exposing them to a natural heat often results in tasty dishes, so reissuing a pair of old pieces and fleshing them out with fresh material seemed like an organic way to progress for the ensemble otherwise known as JEE & BEE. This time, however, the wife-and-husband team of sitar master Joyeeta Sanyal and guitar player Bernard Margarit invited his three scions for a full-blown collaboration that, defying the limited scope of their usual mini-album format, delivers a rich multicultural experience. Never didactic, and entertaining from start to finish, the five numbers on offer bubble with barely contained energy which – a sign of fine artistry – can’t conceal many nuances rendering it all so compelling.
And entrancing too, because opener “Crazy Mind” bends the listener’s mental wave by threading the couple’s strings through a throbbing drone, where one would find it difficult to distinguish electronica from acoustic tones, until male scat and female vocals tap into a sophisticated rhythmic layer that Léo and Nayan Margarit shape up with three Indian percussionists before going for more blissed-out passages. These float to the fore in the romantic “Song For Tania” – dedicated to the drummers’ sister, the main singer and arranger here – whose instrumental vistas get jazzed up once Bernard’s fingers caress the fretboard and the titular lady’s stacked voices give way to her samba-driven piano, the single astonishing shift of the entire record.
The blistering, blinding, brilliant dance of “Jeetu” feels less surprising in the wake of such a trip, despite the presence of bossa nova patterns, and the understated detailing of “Ishwara” comes across as a slight raga-rock respite from the sonic maelstrom the quintet brew with a lot of gusto. Still, the progressive gravity the ruminative, yet heavy, flow of “Song For Benu” projects via its ever-changing stylistic facets is immense – arrestingly hypnotic. A fitting finale for a platter that’s bound to transport the audience to a cloud nine and beyond.
*****
