Transcending musical divides

KOCHI: She toys with genres, straddles cultures and continents, giving you dreamy, stimulating music. Known for her eclectic layering of jazz, blues and classical, Susheela Raman is not one to settle for tags and categories. She merges soul and exuberance into her music in a way that the lines are forever blurred. “Who wants to be defined? I have never found a genre I could fit into. Listeners can make up their own mind,” says the British-Indian musician.

Susheela cracked the charts with her very first album Salt Rain, a glorious blend of oriental and occidental notes. It draws heavily from her Carnatic roots and the vocalist says it’s classical music that instilled in her a strength to explore all other streams of music. “My parents are from Thanjavur and we moved to London in the 1960s. I was born there and then we relocated to Australia. My parents wanted me to learn Indian music to defend and value my identity,” she says. And living abroad meant she was exposed to many kinds of music, shaping the sensibilities of the musician she is toady. “Music is not separate from life, everything you see and hear feeds into it. So for me it has been natural and actually quite important to combine things and move from one thing to another. People change, music changes, nothing in this world is really fixed. Human life is one long migration,” she says.  

It was Sufi and Bhakti traditions that dragged her back to the music of the subcontinent. “I think that kind of music has a certain spiritual intensity and openness. I love the feeling it generates and the way it reaches across barriers of identity,” she says. As a musician she thinks identity is an accident of birth and adds, “music can and should destroy illusions of cultural vanity and separation.”

She believes in the organic quality of music and is quite vocal when it comes to creative collaborations. “For me the music I perform is a meeting of musicians, of individuals. Its not a theoretical, abstract thing.” She adds there is nothing complicated in working through geographic and linguistic barriers. “It helps if you share a language but sometimes the music works by itself without too much explanation. If you can’t play together then no amount of common language is going to help you,” she says.  

Her earlier live shows were usually power-packed, high-energy affairs and Susheela says it was the result of her intimate alliance with a string of Indian styles. “I have done that especially when I was doing a lot of work with Tamil Bhakti and Rajasthani music, Punjabi Qawals and Bengali Bauls. They all have powerful energies in their music,” says the vocalist who adds she is back to a more melodic mode now. “It feels like a long river has come past some turbulent rapids and is in a more gentle floodplain. One’s life in music keeps changing and you have to go with it.”

She has just finished Ghost Gamelan, her latest album for release in 2018. Gamelan is the traditional instrumental ensemble in Java and she took her songs to Indonesia for the work. “Gamelan is mostly tuned metal and wooden percussion and the tuning systems are very different. So it was real adventure working out how to play our songs there. Fortunately the Javanese musicians were very interested to explore and collaborate,” she says. Susheela will be performing in Kovalam Literary Festival scheduled to begin in the city in October. For more details and tickets visit www.insider.in