Castle 2024
Raga-rock from France brings on outrageously fantastic drone to drive the dancefloor frantic.
Shankari
Back home in Kolkata, Joyeeta Sanyal was one of a few female sitar players, acclaimed yet not too famous outside of folk-praising circles, so it took her a trip across half of the world, to Occitania, to become a one-off artist after finding a kindred spirit in guitarist Bernard Margarit who had been fascinated by Indian motifs for quite a time and could reciprocate his new friend’s Eurocentric interests. Of course, the “the twain shall meet” formula might go many ways, with the listeners anticipating various stylistic experiments from the two, only pop aspect of what they landed on together still feels unexpected, and arrestingly good at that. As a result, Jee and Bee are able to constantly shift their focus and steer what can be dubbed world music beyond genre-bending intellectuality and towards impassioned entertainment. Arrayed to form a short but sweet album, the seven wonders of “Shankari” encompass a wide variety of moods without ever straying into overt exotica.
Driven by disco beats that bolster Sanyal’s sonorous licks and Margarit’s riffs which mimic them, the record’s titular opener – a track bearing her mother’s name and his daughter Tania’s vocalese – seems to serve as a perfect introduction to the pair’s method, and the platter’s finale “Goa Vibes” embraces a similar blissed-out, if less sentimental, resonance where acoustic and electric strings engage in a muscular dialogue. However, the initially pensive “Song For Bonu” and “Horizon” explore an expanse of improv with a lot of verve and nerve, trad passages feeding trance grooves and facilitating the soaring of Bernard’s solos and the meandering of Joyeeta’s filigree, and “Jollywood” ties familiar, screen-tested staples into a deceptively simple ear-candy that sticks in the audience’s memory. And then, there’s the piano-rippled “Jumping Frog” poised to surpass superficial pulses once its melodic lines weave a stirring balladry before dissolving into pure jazz, snapping back to throbbing and finally marrying the disparate strands to create an impressive layer of fusion for “Jeetu” to shatter through the belligerent march and another flight of fantasy the duo embark upon.
An utterly delightful combination which promises to deliver many more delights further on.
*****
