Fusion concert: Finally, the twain did meet

Sam Carter, Haroon Samuel, Sajid Hussain and Shehroz played like a house on fire at IVS.

KARACHI: Rudyard Kipling once wrote, “Oh East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.” Well, Sam Carter and Co. weren’t around when the great bard was writing Stalky & Co. And the bard wasn’t around when the fusion concert was held at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture on Saturday evening when a singer with a guitar and three musicians galvanised an audience for 90 minutes.

So we don’t really know if the world would have been deprived of a great poem by the master of jingoistic doggerel. What we do know is that fusion works pretty well - when you have the right combination of artists. There was plenty of reason to be excited by the performance on Saturday evening. Sam Carter, recipient of the Horizon Award, came across as an ordinary zestful singer - eager, warm, friendly and witty. He started the programme with a clutch of songs - solid traditional British Folk reinforced by contemporary themes, while his guitar-based arrangements entered new territory. His song about the death of an older sister aged three was poignant and touching as was the melancholy Irish ballad The South Wind.

After that, the audience entered a new dimension, Fusion, with Haroon Samuel flaying the tabla, Sajid Hussain and his son Shehroz revving up the sitar, and Sam Carter strumming a guitar, all jostling for attention. This was fusion at its best - rock-flavoured material at full throttle, championing the art of revivalism.

The Morning Raag was the piece de résistance. The beat lines remained extraordinarily hypnotic as the sitar players, deftly sketching all the variants, displayed exceptional finger work. In the slow movement, one sitar player produced an atonal passage. Was he trying to strike a Blue Note? The purists may not agree, but in a purely academic sense, the raag has something in common with traditional Jazz, especially in the use of call-and-response. In retrospect, what the audience saw and heard were flashes of sublime, extempore brilliance.

A fusion genre has been described as music that combines two or more styles. For example, rock and roll originally developed as a fusion of blues, gospel and country music. The main characteristics of fusion genre are variations in tempo and the use of long musical journeys - each with their own dynamics. A case in point is Indian classical music where two tabla players might be producing different beats within the same time frame. Most genres evolve out of other genres while fusion music tends to be more synthetic.

As a footnote, in the words of Sam Carter, “It’s not what you come with, but what you leave behind.” What Sam left behind was a spirit of friendship, understanding a desire to integrate and bring the two countries closer together.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 27^th, 2014.