Singer-songwriter Ankur Tewari marvelled at the 150-year-old kamaicha he held in his hands, as the realisation that here was an instrument, all but lost to modern music, dawned on him. Ankur was in Jodhpur, shooting the third season of MTV Sound Trippin’, when he met Dapu Khan Merasi, a folk singer who uses this century-old bow-and-string instrument.
After a hiatus of seven years, MTV has brought back Sound Trippin’, a show that documents raw and unique folk sounds from across the country, via a road trip. “We travelled from Goa to Mussoorie, Rishikesh, Jodhpur and back to Mumbai,” says the Gully Boy music supervisor. Throughout the year, they met musicians from different niches: the Fado vocalists of Goa who specialise in Portuguese music to the Manganiyar community of musicians.
Season 1 of Sound Trippin’ started with Gangs of Wasseypur music director Sneha Khanwalkar capturing sounds from different places that best represented them, and, in season 2, she was joined by Karsh Kale and Nucleya.
“When I was invited by MTV and Hyundai to host this season, I went back and rewatched the old episodes. I saw how Sneha brought her personality into the show. She’s all about sampling, and if you close your eyes and listen to her song, you know it’s hers,” says Ankur, “I wondered, how do I bring myself into the show.” As an artist, Ankur has always considered himself a storyteller. “That’s what I wanted to do with this show. Discover the stories that each of these places want to tell, and bring those out in the form of song and music— in raga, tempo and lyrics,” he says.
Each of the episodes are then based on a theme: ‘Saudade’, ‘Roots’ and ‘Streets and Silence’, and end in a soundtrack, written by Ankur, which blends sounds he picked up from various musicians through the course of the episode.
Back to the roots
For instance in Jodhpur, the experience for Ankur was about emptiness in the streets, leading to a certain calmness inside. “It gave me a feeling of slowness that in a way was always missing from my life,” he says. It was an idea that he often discussed with singer Papon from Assam, which gave itself to a song. “I wanted the song to move, to sway in the way a camel would. Such that you can feel the slowness not just in the BPM (beats per minute) but even in the words, ‘Jo khamoshi me harkat hai wo shor-o-gul me nahin.’”
Another interesting challenge the show brought was to create a beat out of the sounds of a car: door slams, seatbelt clicks and engine revs. But as much as the show was about discovering non-mainstream sounds characteristic of certain regions, for Ankur it was also about rediscovering local sounds he grew up listening to.
Shooting in Uttarakhand was like a homecoming for the Kumaoni musician, whose parents live in Dehradun. Folk to him, like many others before him from Uttarakhand, was always ‘Bedu pako bari masa’. The Kumaoni song, written in 1952 by Brijendra Lal Shah, is an ode to a special, more innocent time in our lives — a comparison between bedu, the fig that ripens round the year, and kaphal, the wild red bayberries that appear only between March and April.
“I took ‘Bedu pako’ as a base, and constructed a song around it merging memories of my childhood to it,” he says. The sounds of the handpan and the flute gave it another dimension. “Because of this show I finally got some quality time at home, to revisit part of my culture and share stories from the land.”
Sound Trippin’ airs every Friday at 7 pm, on MTV.