Calcutta Chronicles: Indian Slide-Guitar Odyssey is a musical journey through the centuries of guitar playing in India. Using three unique guitars that BBC award winner Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya designed himself, each beautiful raga explores influences ranging from Gypsy to Sufi with deep sensitivity and free-flowing movement between past and present, tradition and innovation.

This new album follows on from 3: Calcutta Slide-Guitar, which won a BBC Radio 3 Award for World Music in 2007 and helped bring to the world’s attention Debashish Bhattacharya’s incredible artistry as a musician and slide guitar player and his talent for innovative composition. He is also known for his collaborations with various musicians, including Bob Brozman, Djeli Moussa Diawara and Takashi Hirayasu.

Played on three slide-guitars designed by Debashish, Calcutta Chronicles:  Indian Slide-Guitar Odyssey is an album of Indian raga music, interpreted in a way that is accessible both to the Indian and western listener, touching on the blues, jazz, flamenco and Hawaiian music. His home city, Calcutta (now Kolkata), has for centuries been a centre of artistic excellence and this has strongly influenced Debashish’s development. This, together with his own inspirations drawn from performing and collaborating all over the world, plus elements of Sufism and the origins of the Romani of Hindustan, have resulted in a beautiful and dynamic album.

Debashish grew up in a musical family, accompanying his parents, both singers, on tabla, guitar or tambura.  In the late 1920s, the legendary Hawaiian musician, Tao Moe, visited Calcutta, bringing with him a steel guitar and starting a trend for the instrument. Somehow a steel guitar found its way into the Bhattacharya household and Debashish started to play it.  As his musical career continued he developed his own style of slide guitar playing, adding resonating and drone strings.  He studied with Pandit Brij Bhushan Kabra, who introduced the slide guitar into Indian classical music, and later with vocalist Pandit Ajoy Chakraborty who expanded his knowledge of Raga music. In 2003, aged 40, he was himself made a Pandit (master).

Calcutta Chronicles: Indian Slide-Guitar Odyssey reveals Debashish’s interest in striking a fine line between the contemporary and the ancient.  ‘Nivedan’ (A Journey Beyond Time) is a thumri-based piece that is devotional – portraying dialogues between Lord Krishna and his devotee - but it has a contemporary feel.  ‘Sufi Bhakti’ (Eternal Joy) blends elements from Sufi music and Bhatki, devotional music of India, using the Anandi with the harp, tabla and one-stringed ektara. The composition is within the forms of  the classical raga Bhairavi but there are strong international flavours and rhythms. 

‘Gypsy Anandi’ (Odyssey of Slide Guitar) mixes melodies from diverse cultures – an Indian melody with an Hawaiian flavour, with Afro-Andalusian rhythms but with its soul in raga – played with three different Anandis and ‘Maya’ (Illuslide) has a strong repetitive melody which again blends the raga with rhythms drawn from elsewhere.