Part of the reason Aman Mahajan moved from Boston to Bengaluru in 2010 was the proliferation of venues such as BFlat (brand new back then) that were coming up in the city. Ten years later, a long-standing tussle between residents and pubs has virtually killed the live music scene in the city. Mahajan calls it a huge loss for a city that didn’t have too many live music clubs in any case. It’s one more challenge for a musician who is not part of the commercial scene. As he says, The independent music scene doesn’t have enough stakeholders good artiste managers, booking agents, music business people, indie labels. The musician often ends up taking on all of this. The show, though, must go on.
That’s exactly what Mahajan is doing. In April, he releases Heads and Tales, an album of 15 tracks of which 10 are completely improvised, based on concepts and ideas we came up with in the studio immediately before we recorded them. It’s the result of Tinctures’, a duo project with Berlin-based guitarist Nishad Pandey. Mahajan has also worked with Mystik Vibes (Muthu Kumar and Amith Nadig), …dived into Hindustani and Carnatic music with no formal training and played his compositions with Austrian musicians Patrick Dunst and Grilli Polheimer.
The soft-spoken pianist has also played keyboard and made a few forays into electronic sounds and computer music. His influences range from Indian music to jazz, contemporary pianist Shai Maestro, West African rhythms, percussionist Trilok Gurtu and folk and traditional music.
Mahajan describes himself as a traveller through various musical cultures wanting to converse musically with people from across the globe. Still, there’s a lot of India in his music, he says. Tracks, such as Sitaphalmandi’ and Load Shedding’, capture the quintessence of life in India. Playing music is a sort of internal dance between concept and emotion. How you portray that is your artistry, he says.
Next on Mahajan’s plate is a solo piano India tour in March-April with Vishruti Bindal of Natsukashii Artistes, to promote his new album Refuge, a debut piano-vocal duo effort with Radha Thomas of Bangalore Blues, on April 9, and a few performances in India with Brooklyn-based vocalist Shilpa Ananth.
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