Hindustani Slide Guitar

Debashish Bhattacharya represents a long tradition of adapting “Western” instruments to “Eastern” modes of expression, in this case a modified Hofner hollow-body guitar, to Indian Classical applications. I think it was the esteemed Professor Bivins who first hipped me to his work, but I can’t recall exactly. However my means of ingress, I’m unequivocally hooked and have been for some time. Bhattacharya’s Indian Archives albums are marvelous and allow for full length excursions through several popular raga forms. The best is probably “Raga Bhimpalasi”, a piece popularized by Ravi Shankar and recorded by the master at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival for World Pacific. Bhattacharya spends much of the first fifty minutes, building and retreating in waves through the alap, jor and jhala sections, his calm detailed picking rippling across a bed of braiding tanpuras. It’s the final thirty or so where his transcendental technique really takes off, partially cued by the entry of Samir Chatterjee’s tablas. “Jaw-dropping” doesn’t even begin to describe the improvisational ingenuity on display as patterns glide by at in a blur without losing anything the way of detail or accuracy. The effect of the whole is literally like an aural cleansing. Listening again on a jog along the Mississippi River this weekend, I was completely swept up, the myriad stressors of the last week washed summarily away.

In the copious notes to these releases, Bhattacharya gently, though repeatedly, laments the “lonely” course of his career development. The relationship of guru and pupil is historically central to Indian Classical music and Bhattacharya’s choice of expression complicated his search for such an arrangement. He eventually studied with a series of teachers, among them Indian slide guitarist-pioneer Brij Bushan Kabra and sarodist Ali Akbar Khan. Kabra’s teaching ran contrary to the customary course as he encouraged Bhattacharya to find his own voice, a directive that initially had a detrimental effect on the student whose desire was to copy his mentor. In reflecting on the experience, Bhattacharya almost seems almost sad that he’s had to devise a language of his own given the ‘foreign’ nature of his instrument. It’s an attitude in stark contrast to that of the typical Western improviser who commonly views individual innovation as paramount over deference to tradition. Time proved Kabra’s decision a savvy one as the mandate for self-reliance led Bhattacharya to seek out a myriad of collaborators, among them John McLaughlin and the Hawaiian steel virtuoso Bob Brozman, which have amplified awareness of his music to a global audience. I have yet to hear those encounters, but the music on his India Archives releases as well as Calcutta Slide Guitar, his debut for the Riverboat label, is an aural body I return to often to renew my sense of wonder.