MUMBAI: Indiabeat, a music label known for its Indo fusion music, is ready to launch six albums by this year end. These albums are in various stages of production and will be launched between August and October 2008.
By early September, the label plans to launch a new album titled ‘Namaste’featuring the Karnatriix band featuring John Anthony on guitars, Ustad Faiyaz Ahamed Khan on vocals/sarangi and “Darbuka” Siva on percussion.
Among the albums in the pipeline is guitarist Debashish Bhattacharya’s album which would be launched in late September or October. Bhattacharya has won the BBC world music awards, Asia Pacific, in 2007.
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Next on the cards is a new album with guitarist Henrick Anderson in collaboration with Indian flautist Shashank and an international percussionist Pete Lockett, which is ready for production.
Indiabeat is also planning to re-launch an album by Jazz Guitarist Amit Heri. The album, which has collaborations with some great international artists, Matt Garrison, Matt Renzi, Pete Rendi and Marco Djordjevic will be relaunched with a few newly added tracks by late september. Heri’s music for the film “Morning Raga” was short-listed for the 2006 Oscar nominations.
In October, the label will relaunch an album, ‘American Raga’ by tabla player Broto Roy. A well known percussionist, Roy was nominated in the Instrumental category for the 2007 WAMMIE (Washington Area Music Awards).
Talking about relaunching international albums, apart from the brand new ones, Indiabeat founder Samiran Gupta says, “There are some albums which create ripples overseas and bringing these works to India seems viable because today there are takers for world music genre. Apart from the relaunches, we also have some originals like Talisman which we launched recently and a couple more are lined up.”
Commenting on the commercial viability of out of the box music, Gupta says, “In India, music is a part of bigger entertainment package that is Bollywood and it is not an easy battle to fight against Bollywood on commercial terms. But today there are takers for World Music genre, if we compare Sufi as a genre about a decade ago, nobody knew about it but today Sufi has become essentially mainstream.”
Recently, Blue Incantation, an album by Indiabeat was listed among the Top 10 World Music list chartbusters. Thirteen years after its release, Sanjay Mishra’s Blue Incantation featuring Jerry Garcia album was relaunched in India by Indiabeat. Gupta comments, “Blue Incantation is a historical album and still sells full price at Amazon.com. It was a highly acclaimed path breaking project and due to unfortunate death of Garcia, Sanjay Mishra could not collaborate in any projects with him. Even we were surprised when we got to know that it was among the Planet M’s top 10 in the World music category.”
Referring to the promotional activities carried out by Indiabeat, Gupta says, “Our promotions are basically spreading the word in the media and displays in the retail stores. We ask the retail outlets to play our tracks so that music lovers develop a liking for it. We also promote via websites like the online portal musicyogi.com.”
Basking in the success of the relaunch of his album Blue Incantation, artist Sanjay Mishra, who is based in the US, recalled memories of his association with Jerry Garcia, in an interaction with Radioandmusic.com.
Mishra adds, “We talked about emotional honesty in music, and how the music has to stand on its own. Fame can sell an album initially but if people don’t like it that same fame can bite you and be the object of ridicule.
Jerry’s humility and kindness is rare among “rock stars” and it helped me relax totally. On a musical level I recall his finnicky attention to details and getting it right. We both lamented our inability to play the guitar the way we would like to.”
Sanjay Mishra launched an album Chateau Benaras in 2006 and is now working on his next album.
