Album: Namaste India
Label: Times Music
Price: 295 /-
The santoor and the saxophone are perhaps two of the sweetest sounding instruments in Indian and western music, and in Namaste India, they retain their sweetness. Kenny G’s supersmooth, liquid sax meanders sinuously along every track, complementing and syncopating with the potent mix of percussion and melody that is the Santoor, played deftly by Rahul Sharma. However, an album is not made out of sound quality alone – its soul will always be the compositions, the tunes, their memorability, and this is where Namaste India, which could have been a stirring confluence of Indian and Western popular instrumental music, falls slightly short of being a complete album. It does have two extremely catchy original tracks and an excellent reinterpretation of a Hindi cinema classic.
The bane of any new instrumental album is the fact that every original instrumental track needs to be played several times to etch itself into your memory. Namaste India, a small album by international standards in terms of the number of tracks (it has 6+1 reinterpretation instead of the normal 8 to 10 tracks) fortunately, has two such tracks that don’t need too much of looped playing to achieve that.
The title track itself, the album opener, slips into third gear from the word go — a vocal Namaste refrain, which quickly gives up its vocals to Kenny G’s smooth sax rendition, with the santoor joining in, and a full bodied, stylish bass riff and a soft-edged, programmed percussion, which the entire composition rides together. Quite more uptempo than Kenny G’s normally languid tunes, and the melodic hits of the Santoor complement the saxopohone’s liquid grace. All of which, together, juxtapose extremely sharply, and suddenly, with the very earthy and rough-edged rolls and fills of the Mridangam. That, incidentally, is just the first track, Namaste, which should definitely be on the top ten of elevator music.
The second memorable track on Namaste India is, coincidentally, the second on the album too — Brahma Vishnu Shiva It is named thus because, it seems, there must be a â€?traditional’ branding to a track opening with a sombre tanpura, Om Shaati and Brahma Vishnu Shiva refrain. But the rest of the stylish mid-paced Sade-ish composition, though catchy, wouldn’t have been affected one bit if the Brahma Vishnu Siva elements had been removed. By itself, the track is a clean and direct example of the sax-santoor-sax â€?alternations’, to coin a term, with Kenny G and Rahul Sharma, who recorded their respective instruments in London and Mumbai studios separately, playing together this simple, memorable tune flowing across a sinuous bass underliner.
Among the other tracks, only the Silisila reinterpretation of Ye Kahaan Aa Gaye Hum, with Amitabh Bachchan’s voice track retained, is catchy, because it enjoys the inherent advantage of being a well loved song and therefore a remembered tune in the first place, and because both Kenny G and Rahul Sharma excel at playing out the simple tune, which undulates smoothly. Lilting, even though Kenny G’s first piece in the track sounds completely arbitrary and so not required.
The other tunes are not very memorable compositions, though they vary in tempo and arrangements, so they will need repeated play to make themselves understood and remembered, but that, as one has shared, is the bane of all new instrumental music. It has to fight to get familiar. So, wherever plush 5-star elevators float, Namaste India will likely be heard. This is good elevator music.
