Experiments with songs and music are always on the mind of award-winning writer Amit Chaudhuri, who recently toured the country with his unique multimedia music concert, a project that finds its origins in pure chance.
The concert "A Moment of Mishearing", a mash-up of film and audio, is a narrative of how Chaudhuri begins to hear classical Hindustani ragas inside western tunes and his subsequent plunge into a full-fledged career as a recording and performing artiste.
"The idea was conceived by me. I have been a serious musician for a long time now and have been giving concerts and many people wanted to know more about how it began. I thought why not put together a narrative that I tell audiences and convert experiences of mine into this multimedia project," Chaudhuri told PTI.
The author-musician recently participated in The Park's New Festival, organised by the Prakriti Foundation in six cities including Delhi.
In the new live "concert", Chaudhuri takes the viewer through a narrative interspersed with visuals, song and words.
He says he first had a "mishearing" midway while practising the morning raga Todi, the riff to Eric Clapton's "Layla". Then several years later, the author had yet another "mishearing" when he was certain he heard "Auld Lang Syne" a Scottish melody, amid the santoor strains played in the lobby of a hotel in Kolkata.
Much later returning to India after a brief stint abroad Chaudhuri "mishears" Indian ragas while listening to a blues album by American musician Jimi Hendrix.
"I don't go looking, these 'mishearings' happen by pure chance. The inspiration could be from anywhere and any type of music. It can be even from a car horn," says the author, whose first music project "This is not Fusion" experimented with disparate elements like raga, blues, jazz, techno and disco genres of music coming together in 2004. It was made into a music album.
