Bombay Dub Orchestra in Echoes Podcast

Hear Bombay Dub Orchestra tell
Tales from the Grand Bazaar on ECHOES PODCAST

Go directly here for BDO Podcast

I first heard of Garry Hughes back in the 1980s when he was making space music albums like Ancient Evenings and Sacred Cities for the Audion label.  He gone on to be a top producer and session musician in England.  Andrew T. MacKay is also an English session artist playing keyboards and arranging orchestras.  In the mid 2000’s they created a concept called Bombay Dub Orchestra, mixing electronic moods, Bollywood strings, Indian instruments and reggae dub strategies.  Their two previous CDs, Bombay Dub Orchestra and Three Cities were both Echoes CDs of the Month. They’ve just released their third full-length album, Tales from the Grand Bazaar and it should have been a CD of the Month pick.  The album takes them from India to Istanbul to Jamaica where Reggae rhythm legends Sly Dunbar & Robbie Shakespeare recorded with them.  It’s an album of serene and soaring strings, seductive rhythms, and gorgeous melodies spun from eastern instruments and voices.   Hear tales from  Bombay Dub Orchestra when I interview them ECHOES PODCAST

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

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THE ECHOES LIVING ROOM CONCERTS VOLUME 19

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From India to Istanbul, England to Jamaica: Bombay Dub Orchestra

Hear Bombay Dub Orchestra talk about their wonderful new CD,
Tales from the Grand Bazaar tonight on Echoes.

I first heard of Garry Hughes back in the 1980s when he was making space music albums like Ancient Evenings and Sacred Cities for the Audion label.  He gone on to be a top producer and session musician in England.  Andrew T. MacKay is also an English session artist playing keyboards and arranging orchestras.  In the mid 2000’s they created a concept called Bombay Dub Orchestra, mixing electronic moods, Bollywood strings, Indian instruments and reggae dub strategies.  Their two previous CDs, Bombay Dub Orchestra and Three Cities were both Echoes CDs of the Month. They’ve just released their third full-length album, Tales from the Grand Bazaar and it should have been a CD of the Month pick.  The album takes them from India to Istanbul to Jamaica where Reggae rhythm legends Sly Dunbar & Robbie Shakespeare recorded with them.  It’s an album of serene and soaring strings, seductive rhythms, and gorgeous melodies spun from eastern instruments and voices.   Hear tales from  Bombay Dub Orchestra when I interview them tonight on Echoes.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club.  Hammock’s Oblivion Hymns is our January   CD of the Month.  You’ll get great CDs and help support Echoes at the same time.   You can do it all right here.

OR

Pick Up  TRANSMISSIONS:
THE ECHOES LIVING ROOM CONCERTS VOLUME 19

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind when Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album. Or Follow us on Twitter@echoesradio.

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

Bombay Dub Orchestra Returns

Bombay Dub Orchestra & Emiliana Torrini Release first new albums in five years.

It’s been a longtime waiting for new music by east-west-electronica mavens, Bombay Dub Orchestra.  The team of Garry Hughes & Andrew T.  MacKay created some of the definitive world fusion music of the new millennium with their self-titled debut and 3 Cities, both of which were Echoes CD of the Month picks.  With electronics and Indian music as the core of their sound, they travel to further flung climes with Tales from the Grand Bazaar bringing in middle eastern elements from Turkey and living up to the “Dub” part of their name with appearances by Sly Dunbar & Robbie Shakespeare, rhythm icons of Jamaican reggae.   Their seamless blending of orchestra, electronics, global instruments and modern grooves makes them true inhabitants of the 21st Century global village.  We’ll hear music from them today.

Emiliana Torrini – Tookah

We’ve also got new music from Emiliana Torrini, the Icelandic singer with the un-Icelandic name.  Her father is Italian and Emiliana currently lives in Italy.  Like Bombay Dub Orchestra, it’s been five years since her last album of new music although we’ve heard her quite a bit this year on Olivier Libaux’s Uncovered Queens of the Stone Age.   After moving into abstracted terrain with Me and Arini in 2008, Torrini returns to melodic form with Tookah, a word that looks and sounds like hookah, but has nothing to do with that, I think.

So lighten up yourself and take a toke on the Tookah tonight on Echoes.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Sign up for Echoes CD of the Month Club.   CD of the Month Club members will be getting Darshan Ambient’s Little Things 10 days before its released.  Follow the link to the Echoes CD of the Month Club and see what you’ve been missing.

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Anoushka Shankar’s Family Affair

The Daughter of an Icon Looks Back and Looks Forward.

Just got a peak at the forthcoming Anoushka Shankar album, Traces of You.  Just to judge from the EPK, it could be her best album yet.  Produced by Nitin Sawhney and featuring vocals from Shankar’s sister, Norah Jones, it appears to be a blend of traditional music with a modernist sensibility and a reflection on her father, Indian sitar icon, Ravi Shankar, who passed away last year.  Anoushka studied literally at the feet of her father and brings not only his impeccable technique to her music, but his raging musical curiosity and eclecticism.  Expect to hear this album a lot on Echoes this fall.

John Diliberto (((echoes))

Support Echoes by becoming a member of the Echoes Sound Circle.

Think of the great artists you love on Echoes. Think of the informative interviews and exclusive live performances. Then, think of a world without Echoes. You can make sure that never happens by becoming a member of the Echoes Sound Circle.

Echoes is a non-profit 501(c3) organization just like your local public radio station. And all donations are tax deductible. You can support Echoes with a monthly donation that will barely disturb your credit card.

Join the Echoes Sound Circle and keep the soundscapes of Echoes flowing!

55th Grammy Awards-Return of Pure New Age.

New Age Music reasserts its hold on the Grammy’s New Age Category.

I won’t be able to get my chakras in an uproar about the absurdity of the New Age Grammy category this year.  (See previous rants & reflections Grammys Goof Again in the New Age)  There aren’t any  hack New Agers that no one has ever heard of on the list this year.  In fact, while hardly inspiring in a musical sense, this year’s class represents the purest New Age music nominations in years.

Devotees of the genre, the ones who lamented Peter Gabriel winning a Grammy in 1990 for Passion, Jack DeJohnette in 2009 and Pat Metheny in 2012 will be happy to see several examples of pure New Age Music in the Grammy category this year.

Four out of the six nominated albums, Krishna Das’s Live Ananda, Michael Brant De Maria’s Bindu , Steven Halpern’s Deep Alpha and Peter Kater’s Light Body, are examples of new age music in its most unadulterated form.  All but Krishna Das are meditative, light on rhythm and melody, high on atmosphere and mood.  It’s the quintessential sound for massage, guided meditation, and healing that New Age purported to be back in the 1970s.  That’s exactly when Steven Halpern began.

It could be argued that Steven Halpern created the New Age genre.  He’s certainly a pioneer, one of the first to specifically market to the meditation and healing community.  Surprisingly, this is his first Grammy nomination. Halpern’s Deep Alpha, whose subtitle is Brainwave Synchronization for Meditation and Healing, could’ve been recorded back in 1975 when he released his first album, Spectrum Suite.  Sonorous and relentlessly tonal, Halpern floats on clouds of electric Rhodes piano, its soft-focus bell-like tones hanging in space, always pleasant, but never resolving into a melody or a progression.  In other words, classic New Age music in caps.

Eight-time Grammy nominee, Peter Kater follows suit with Light Body,  music designed around the chakras, the most popular New Age trope.  Kater is a pianist and composer of broad skills and technique, but here he goes for drifty music: spare piano notes etched in the sky while the voices of angels caress your brow with gates-of-heaven sighs.  But unlike Halpern, Kater can’t help but bring in some melody eventually, playing classically-tinged themes, like Debussy in a dream with Paul McCandless’ always soulful oboe keening across the changes.

Michael Brant DeMaria is a little less well-known, although he’s been nominated twice before.  He has albums with a more robust chamber world music sound, but this psychologist/musician also has a hard core New Age side.  Bindu is lovely in its sonics; beautiful keyboards from acoustic piano to synths, ethnic percussion, native flutes.  It’s all present in music that blows  perfumed breaths but never really intrudes, or aspires to much beyond a serene mood.

All three of these albums subscribe to the hard core, original dictates of New Age music, the sound before more adventurous sonic explorers like Steve Roach, Michael Stearns, Robert Rich and even George Winston came on the scene.

Krishna Das’ music isn’t quite as meditative as these three, but he also takes his inspiration from eastern music and philosophies, in this case, Hindu chants.  He’s one of the superstars on the Kirtan chanting scene. As Das recordings go, Live Ananda is less ecstatic and more serene than some of his other CDs.  His coarse, guttural voice intones the chants against tablas, harmonium, occasional strings and a chorus of his followers.  For the uninitiated, think Hare Krishna for the upwardly mobile.

While these artists subscribe to the original tenets of New Age music, Omar Akram’s Echoes Of Love represents the commercialization of New Age into the middle of the road, easy listening music.  This is upscale dinner music, pleasant melodies, vaguely exotic instrumentation, nice atmospheres, all mixed into a sweet sonic cocktail.  No healing, meditation or exploration here, just Muzak™.

The odd nominee out this year is Loreena McKennitt.  For years, the New Age category has been a harbor for artists like McKennitt who couldn’t find a home elsewhere.  But in 2012, her Troubadours on the Rhine, a live recording of her more traditionally Celtic, albeit exotic and Middle-Eastern-ized sound, seems to be from another planet, and certainly another category entirely.

The Grammys are flawed in so many ways, and the fact that an artist like Loreena McKennitt sticks out in the category is an issue that should be addressed.    She elevates the category by her presence, but really shares little with it aesthetically, spiritually or even in image.   In which case, where does that leave groups like Dead Can Dance, Hammock, Steve Roach, The Album Leaf, or even Sigur Ros?.

Oh, and if I’m making a pick, I guess it’s Loreena McKennitt, both to win and as a personal choice.

John Diliberto

Vote in the Best of Echoes 2012 Poll
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ADDENDUM: The main reason we conduct our Best of Echoes year end polls is  we want to recognize artists like Loreena McKennitt, who don’t get acknowledged by other awards or even other media.  For example, check out NPR’s Year End lists.  Let me know if you find an Echoes artist on there, let alone an Echoes list.

So, you can’t vote in the Grammys.  But you can send a message to the world about the music you love by voting in the Best of Echoes 2012 Poll today.  And you can also win a years subscription to Echoes On-Line, a membership to the Echoes CD of the Month Clubor a copy of Tangents – The Echoes Living Room Concerts Volume 18.

Vote now, for the Poll that really matters if you love this music.

Sign up forEchoes CD of the Month Club now and receive the December CD pick, Hammock’s Departure Songs . With the Echoes CD of the Month Club, you get great CDs like this coming to you each month.  Follow the link to the Echoes CD of the Month Club  and see what you’ve been missing.

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Eastern Moods for Echoes October CD of the Month

You can trace many movements in modern music back to The Beatles, and they are at the roots of Hans Christian and Harry Manx.  Not The Beatles of “She Loves You,” but the eastern-influenced Beatles of “Tomorrow Never Knows” and especially “Within You Without You.” Musicians like the German-born Christian and English-born Manx were inspired by those sounds to head east, although each approached it from a different perspective.

HANS CHRISTIAN is a classically trained cellist whose 1990s albums, Phantoms and Surrender, took his instrument into electronic and ambient terrain.  But it was his work with Rasa where he found his true voice, partly inspired by George Harrison’s recording of devotional chants from the Radha Krsna Temple.  He’d become expert on the Indian sarangi, the Swedish nyckelharpe and the sitara, and he curved the sounds of these instruments into yearning melodies, wrapped them up in electronica atmospheres, and caressed the voice of his partner, singer Kim Waters.  Rasa broke up, but Christian contines that sound, sans Hindu chants, on You Are the Music of My Silence.

HARRY MANX joins Christian, singing, playing guitars and the Indian lap guitar called the Mohan Vina.  He went east through the The Beatles and the blues, and he has several solo albums out as a singer-songwriter that fuse those worlds.  On his own, he has a lighter, more pop and punny approach as evidenced by some of his album titles: Bread and Buddha, Mantras for Madmen and West Eats Meet.  He goes a bit deeper with Christian, forging an album that seduces you with gentle, folk-like melodies and lifts you with an exotic instrumental array: they’re global mystic minstrels jacked into the net.

Every song on this album is a journey.  Sometimes it’s a slow river ride like “Harmonious Convergence,” which lazes along on the laziest, haziest summer day.  But more often, it takes off on the melodic flights like those on “Apparently an Apparition,” mixing electronic grooves, string sections and solos on Mohan Vina, in an exhilarating swirl.
Some songs are gently lulling, like “I Saw It In Your Eyes” while others, like “Shorthand Prophecy,” propel you through an imaginary bazaar at the crossroads of Ibiza and Mumbai, with Manx singing the rhythmic syllables of Indian bols.  In the midst of this Indian drive, Christian drops in a startling jazz fusion electric bass solo that makes you realize what a supreme instrumentalist he is.

Like George Harrison and The Beatles, Hans Christian and Harry Manx aren’t attempting to make traditional Indian music.  Instead of straight ragas, they channel that spirit into a new sound, one full of ear-catching melody, propulsive rhythms and serenely enticing atmospheres that beckon you into their temple.  You Are the Music of My Silence is the sound you might hear in your deepest, quietest space.

Hans Christian & Harry Manx’s You Are the Music of My Silence will be featured on Echoes Monday, October 1 and the weekend of October 5.

~© 2012 John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line.  Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

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Todd Boston Alive-Echoes October CD of the Month.

World Fusion in a Pastoral Mode from Urban Nature Guitarist

Todd Boston is a child of Windham Hill records and Shakti and you can hear that with his world fusion duo, Urban Nature and on Alive, his solo debut.  Although to call it solo might be a misnomer.  Boston plays acoustic guitar as well as flute, bass and percussion and he’s joined on many tracks by his Urban Nature partner, Ramesh Kannan on tabla.

Listen to Todd Boston’s “Twilight”

He’s also doing live looping.  He’ll lay a guitar line down and just as you’re getting lost in the melody, a new theme comes in, played in real time while the original melody continues in a loop.

Urban Nature with John Diliberto in Echoes Concert

That makes Alive a lot more than your standard finger-style solo guitar album.  Boston creates deep meditative pieces that swirl with melody, from the refined strains of “Harmony” with Boston weaving flute melodies through his guitar filigree to the gentle sound of “The Brightest Night,” where he plays a simple solo line, plucking harmonics against a back drop of bass and crickets. “Midnight Dreaming,” is a caravan crossing, with Kannan’s tabla groove loping underneath Boston who first plays guitar and then brings in the bansuri flute.

Calling this album meditative might be misleading.  Much of it is buoyant, like “Just The Beginning” with its Celtic trilling once Boston hits the solo run.  The folk-like refrains of “Skipping” sound like an Appalachian folk song with Indian percussion.  Boston isn’t afraid to toss anything into the mix, including some country slide guitar on “3AM.”

Listen to Todd Boston’s “Skipping.”

Todd Boston is getting into a different sound on Alive. You can hear his roots, but he has a more pastoral feel than Shakti, especially when cellist Matthew Schoening guests on the luxurious expanse of “Twilight.”   There’s also a more expansive approach to melody than you’ll find on most Windham Hill records.

Todd Boston is now working with Windham Hill founder/guitarist Will Ackerman, but I’m not sure how much that can improve upon Alive,  an auspicious debut from a soulful musician.

We’ll be featuring Todd Boston’s Alive,  on Monday’s Echoes, 10/04/10, as well as on our weekend stations that following Saturday and Sunday.

Hear an interview with Todd Boston’s duo, Urban Nature:

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Echo Location: Bombay Dub Orchestra

A journey into exotica with Bombay Dub Orchestra

You can hear an audio version of this blog with music.

East-west fusions have been going on since at least the early 1960s when Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar sat down with musicians like jazz saxophonist Bud Shank and classical violinist Yehudi Menuhin.  That cross-legged crossover hasn’t stopped and one of the latest iterations comes from the Bombay Dub Orchestra.

Bombay Dub Orchestra put out their first album in 2006, and it redefined the east west landscape. It was created by two veteran English musicians. Garry Hughes and Andrew T. Mackay. Hughes had put out a pair of solo electronic CDs in the 1980s and went on to work with Björk and helped launch the band, Euphoria. Mackay was a journeyman musician playing keyboards and doing orchestral scoring. They got together on a session that took them to Mumbai, India and the idea of Bombay Dub Orchestra, to combine Bollywood string orchestras, Indian solists and electronics, was born.

There are a lot of acts sampling world music, but Bombay Dub Orchestra’s compositions are played  by live musicians, 70 or so on their new CD, 3 Cities. Bansuri flutes, sitars, and santoors float through a landscape of lush Bollywood string orchestras arranged by Andrew T. Mackay.   Bombay Dub Orchestra set these acoustic instruments in an electronically percolating backdrop mostly provided by Garry Hughes’ from his collection of vintage synthesizers. Garry creates the soundpool where east and west, ancient and modern converge.

The new album by The Bombay Dub Orchestra is called 3 Cities.  The name is a reference to their travels to London, Mumbai and Chennai to record the album and it has a cinematic expanse, like one of those exotic 1950’s road movies transferred to the 21st century.

Bombay Dub Orchestras 3 Cities is the Echoes CD of the Month for November and I’ll be featuring it next Monday, November 3 and we’ll hear an interview with Bombay Dub Orchestra the following Monday, November 10 on Echoes. This has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music.  You can hear an audio version of this Echo Location with music.  You can also read a full review of 3 Cities.
John Diliberto ((( echoes )))