Arijit Mukherji wants to popularise the mouth organ.
The impressive collection of mouth organs that reside in Arijit Mukherji’s home in Gurgaon belies his profession. When he’s not at work at Fidelity Investments, he’s playing his favourite instrument — a beautiful Larry Adler Professional. And that’s just one of the many pieces that he has hand-picked, over decades, from different parts of the world. He is primarily steeped in the Western musical tradition, unlike many lovers of music in India. Not many Indians, he says, have taken up the mouth organ.
While Mukherji never harboured dreams of being a full-time musician, his dedication to the instrument is, nonetheless, admirable. He includes an hour-and-a-half of practice every morning and considerably more time when he’s practicing to record for his albums. “The only travel which I do during my annual leave from work is for my recordings,” he says, dispelling the myth that this instrument is just about “blowing and drawing”.
“I take my music seriously because I aim to revive this instrument in India,” says Mukherji. He learnt the tabla at the age of six, followed by guitar, but it was the mouth organ which he learnt most enthusiastically. It was his uncle, Milan Gupta, a renowned solo mouth organ artiste in the country, who gave Mukherji his first lessons, he remembers fondly.
More than 25 years later, he recalls how the right side of his mouth and tongue regularly got bruised due to regular practice. “When the art — and style — of playing the mouth organ seeps into your senses, and you have successfully adapted to the use of your tongue while playing, it no longer pains that much,” he says.
Mukherji started learning the instrument theoretically only five years ago, and admits that even though a mouth organ is pocket-sized, it’s extremely complicated in structure. While this instrument is more popular in Western music, Mukherji, through his albums, has Indianised his tunes. “When you hear Clapton, you know it’s him. I have developed my own tone which, thankfully, my uncle loved when he heard,” he says.
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Mukherji, with his immense talent, touches high pitch as easily as he swoops into low notes, thanks to the regularity of his practice hours. Small wonder then that his humble mouth organ resonates, in recording sessions, with a host of other instruments including the sarod, sitar, guitar, flute and santoor.
“The first time I recorded an album, the idea was not to sell. We were playing in Usha Uthup’s studio in Kolkata and she heard us by accident,” he says. What followed was a hand-written letter of recommendation by Uthup — who absolutely loved his work — and that’s how Mukherji cut his first album with Music Today.
Mukherji feels that he has been fortunate to meet the right people on the music circuit. Music director Shantanu Moitra, for example, has been a source of guidance and support and one of his mentors too. “He’s an honest person. Every time I’ve had trouble adapting a song to the instrument, I seek his advice,” says Mukherji.
Mouth organ in hand, Mukherji slides a CD into a music player and allows me to listen to his new album, A Tribute to Kishore Kumar, by T-Series. We listen to “Zindagi ka Safar” a popular Hindi movie track, to which Mukherji has given a distinct western feel and turned it into a rock ballad. He pauses to point out another track on the album, “Jeevan ke Safar mein Raahi” which also has a noticeable western influence. “The song is a copy of a Mexican tune, in the first place. I worked around it, changed the rhythm, but still retained an Indian feel,” he explains.
Mukherji has also done jugalbandi of sorts in his albums. With sarod artiste Pratyush Banerjee, for instance (“He’s also a family friend,” he says), Mukherji has created albums. One of his earlier albums, Down Memory Lane, by Music Today, recreated some of the works of legendary artistes like R D Burman and Salil Chaudhary. “When people heard I was trying to recreate Salil da’s work, they were astounded,” says Mukherji, who recently visited Mozart’s house in Salzburg and jokes that he can now die in peace.
Planning to work on an album of Latin melodies as well as Rabindra Sangeet, Mukherji worries that his favourite instrument might just be falling off the musical map in the country. The artiste encourages children in the neighbourhood to take lessons from him. “People are keen on performances rather than learning,” he rues.
For Mukherji, after all, it’s music that still continues.