Swamini A. C. Turiyasangitananda, who passed away on Friday in Los Angeles, was a working-class, African-American daughter of Detroit who embraced her spiritual calling nearly 40 years ago:

During the end of 1968, Swamini, directed by God, entered a most significant period of isolation. The Supreme Lord provided wisdom, knowledge, guidance, and instruction consonant with and essential to her designated lifeÂ’s tenure… Swamini received her initiation into the renounced order of sannyas directly from the Supreme Lord. … Swamini took mantra initiation with Swami Satchidananda.

It was a time of great cultural turmoil and motion in American society, and Swamini had found herself at the heart of it. Known to the secular world as Alice McCleod Coltrane, she met John Coltrane in 1962, married him in 1965, and joined his band, playing piano and other instruments, in 1966. After his death of liver disease in the summer of 1967, she continued on both tracks of the path they had traveled together: the musical and the spiritual. Journey in Satchidananda, the album she released in 1970 featuring among others Rashied Ali, Charlie Haden and Pharoah Sanders, is an early document of her progress and the depth of her research and dedication. It still listens well today, one of the strongest surviving documents of the sincere fascination the creative music scene had with both Indian music and Hindu spirituality at that time, a far cry from the more superficial flirtations of the Beatles or the ephemeral Haight-Ashbury philosopher-kings.

For the rest of her life Alice was considered a recluse, recording at a limited pace and rarely appearing in concert; her vow of sanyas and commitment to the spiritual life meant that she spent most of her time at home with her family, at the ashram she founded in the Santa Monica Hills, or traveling to India to worship with Sri Satya Sai Baba.

In 2004, Alice Coltrane released a spectacular album called Translinear Light. It features sons Ravi and Oran on saxophones, Jeff “Tain” Watts and Jack DeJohnette on drums, and once again Charlie Haden — a veteran of the final Coltrane bands and a deep humanist, in addition to a master of his instrument — on bass. (The group conducted a rare tour last fall, and I am sad that I missed their October gig at NJPAC in Newark. It’s a reminder that one must never miss an opportunity to see a great master perform as you never know when she will be taken from us.)

The passing of Alice Coltrane is a sad moment for jazz. It is also an chance for those of us who live at the intersection of American and South Asian cultures to honor someone who embraced that conversation at a very deep, creative level. On the day we honor Martin Luther King, Jr., who learned so much from Gandhiji, it’s another fitting reminder that the conversation has a rich history, and that its potential is far from exhausted. Continue reading →

This is a sister called Shakti who is making commercially-oriented urban pop music and is based as far as I can tell in New York (thanks tipster Sonia!). She’s another MySpace-era striver who has a single on iTunes, a website with more bells and whistles than she has material to fill it, an embryonic line of fashion accessories, and a producer-songwriter-laptop wizard behind her looking to become the next Timbaland. (He has another artist called Asia Minor.)

She’s also generous with the Indo-flavored exotica, announcing “Namaste” on her website and putting forward, in her various materials, the full complement of noserings, silk scarves, saris, and the like, combined with the racy iconography of today’s commercial R&B. There’s also a Kama Sutra reference and a camel (not together). And there’s some really ugly short promotional clips online that truck in cab driver and 7-Eleven nonsense.

And the music? It’s pretty good on balance, although the single for sale (and yo, what kind of viral marketing strategy is it to put your first record out and charge folks for it?) called “Do the Thang Thang,” hardly does justice to Shakti’s extensive classical and jazz training AND Berklee School of Music bachelor’s degree AND Chicago Music College master’s degree with lyrics like this:

Do the thang thang
Freak your body body
Don’t hurt nobody body
Let’s get naughty naughty.

There are a couple of remixes that make things a bit more interesting, thanks in part to the singer on the bhangra version (a free copy of which is floating around online).

The song on the YouTube clip here, “Let Me Dance,” I like a lot more. Now the Orientalism police (which I occasionally roll with, I admit) won’t be feeling Shakti’s thang thang overall, but if you suspend that reservation for a minute the sinewy groove and bedroom themes might just get to ya.

What I can’t figure out is the end of the line that begins “Just like the Kama Sutra…” It occurs twice in the song. Any sharp ears out there able to decode it? Conferral of the official Sepia Mutiny seal of approval might just depend on those hard-to-make-out words… Continue reading →

In the spirit of the holiday season and the Macaca Music Poll, here’s a gift of Sepia hype for another aspiring rock band with desi leadership. It helps that they’re pretty damn good! Prabir and the Substitutes are from — where else? — the real world of Virginia and play real short power-pop songs with throwback 1970s/psychedelic inclinations, all the way to the background ooh-ooh harmonizing, Brian Wilson references and best of all, Prabir-ji’s monumental muttonchops, in which small animals could take shelter from the elements, and which you can admire in their full glory at the end of this clip. Rock on, blood! Continue reading →

YES YES YÂ’ALL, and you donÂ’t stop! ItÂ’s the moment youÂ’ve been waiting for. I am happy to bring you the results of the 2006 Inaugural Sepia Mutiny Macaca Music Poll. It took me some time to compile the results, a task made both necessary and pleasant by the high quality and fabulous diversity of your submissions. The best part of all, for me, was that you forced me to listen to a whole lot of music IÂ’d never heard of, or not gotten around to hear. Dhanyawad, bahut dhanyawad, for expanding my ears.

After weeding out submissions of music that came out earlier than 2006, and disregarding entries of a trollish or spamlike nature, we were left with 56 valid ballots. They seem to divide evenly among men and women, confirming that music geekery is a democratic and universal condition. Regulars and lurkers are evenly represented as well. The full list of voters is at the end of this post.

And now…drumroll please…the results: Continue reading →

I recently discovered the music of Arthi Meera on Myspace, and even though it’s probably too late to get counted on Siddhartha’s end of the year poll, I think readers might want to go check her out.

Of the songs that are up at Myspace, “Silty Sea” has gotten the most plays — and it’s a lovely song. But “Wander Away” is a catchy and infectious pop melody. Her album is also available via Itunes (I would recommend “In my head” and “It’s not you.”).

Arthi, who plays guitar and sings on all her songs, was raised in Chicago, and lives there now. She says she was trained in classical Hindustani singing, though the songs on her album show no trace of that particular background. Snippets of her voice, singing “Pardesi Jaana Nahin,” are in the closing credits of the film V For Vendetta (listen to BKAB Speechless at Ethan Stoller’s Myspace page; incidentally, Manish mentioned this song months ago). [Correction: that is not Arthi Meera’s voice, I’m told.]

I was a little curious about how she went from ‘A’ to ‘B’, so I sent her an email with some questions. Her reply was pretty thought-provoking. Continue reading →

You dandies must be too busy shopping for lipstick or fretting about your naughty bits, because the volume of submissions to the Macaca Music Poll has been shamefully low. Don’t get me wrong: the quality has been high, and I’m going to need a couple of days to track down some of the picks and pull together a wrap-up post worthy of the contributions. However, there are a LOT of regulars who have yet to submit entries — yeah, y’all know who you are — and I know some of you lurkers have some cool picks to share as well.

So here it is: Last Call for the poll. Send me a list of up to five songs or albums that did it for you this year. Need inspiration? Here are my choices for the Boston Globe and for WNYC. You’ll also find picks in all categories from my colleagues at both outlets here and here. Email your suggestions here. I’ll post results by the weekend. Peace and humptiness forevah! Continue reading →

Sacrificing to a year-end ritual, I’ve been compiling my “best of 2006” music lists for various outlets. It’s a cool exercise as long as you don’t take it too seriously; when you’re in the arts writing business, you have the chance to check out oodles of new releases, and you need to employ filters like genre, or label, or simply your own whimsy, just to sort through the pile let alone pick your favorites. Despite this, I get value from learning what other critics enjoyed, and I do my best to make my own picks useful and interesting, in particular by looking for sounds that folks might have missed, yet are not so obscure as to be un-findable in stores or online.

Still, they say everyone’s a critic, and (to endorse what Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd stated in the comments I quoted here) these days technology and the emergence of online communities makes everyone even more of a critic than before. It’s easy to set up your soapbox, and there’s even a chance someone will hear, maybe even respond. So since we’re all critics, and I know there’s some serious, multi-faceted, all-over-the-place music listening that goes on out there in Sepia-land, I am proud to bring you the MACACA MUSIC POLL.

Here’s how it works. I can’t be bothered to figure out how to code a poll, and besides, I have something much simpler in mind. I would like everyone to tell us five pieces of music that they would recommend to the community. Each piece can be an album or an individual song. All genres are included, and there is no desi criterion. Just as long as it came out in 2006 (or late 2005), if it moved you, grooved you, or soothed you in ’06, tell the world about it.

Email your list of 5 picks to this address. I will stop taking entries in one week, Wednesday, December 20, and I will compile the results and present them in some fun manner in the following days.

To preserve the spirit of the exercise, please don’t enter your list in the comments to this post; email it to me instead. (I will keep all addresses in confidence, of course.) More general conversation is welcome, however, about the directions music went in ’06, the value or otherwise of year-end lists, criticism and its pitfalls, or anything else that comes to mind. C’mon, let’s play! Continue reading →

One of the difficulties in being a non-Christian in a predominantly Christian country is the relentless onslaught of Christmas jingles you hear around this time of the year. The latest culprit in my mindspace is the JCPenney’s ad featuring Bing Crosby’s voice and Fatboy Slim’s beats, which makes for a ridiculously catchy breakbeat version of “Here Comes Santa Claus” (via Tamasha). Earlier, we talked about “Songs for the Sleepless”; this is more like “songs for the hyper-caffeinated.”

The “original” video to the Fatboy Slim song is here, but it’s so bad I actually prefer this Youtube-ified anime remake.

Speaking of Youtube and Fatboy Slim, I was reading a Jon Pareles article about the phenomenon over the weekend, and thinking about the possible desi connections. The paragraph that stood out to me was this one:

In the process, another thing users generate is back talk. Surfing YouTube can be a survey of individual reactions to pop culture: movie and television characters transplanted out of their original plots or synched to improbable songs, pop hits revamped as comedy or attached to new, unauthorized imagery. (Try searching for Justin Timberlake on YouTube to see all the variations, loving and snide, on his single “Sexyback.”) (link)

While Youtube has millions of teenagers doing dance karaoke with varying levels of skill, as far as I can tell the current younger generation of desis hasn’t really taken advantage of it as much as one might expect. Part of the problem, of course, is that there aren’t really very many iconic desi figures to “personalize” (or travesty) to begin with. Continue reading →

You know what the world needs more of? It needs more desi boy bands.

We have plenty of desi doctors, lawyers, engineers, I-bankers, actors, astronauts and rappers, but there’s a real deficit in the boy band category. This is why I love the idea of the Montreal based boy band JoSH (that’s a long O, like Joe, not like Joshua). [The band’s slick webpage; their myspace page]

The group is actually only the duo of Q (Qurram Hussain) and Rup (Rupinder Magon) – Q is the one who looks like Lenny Kravitz, and Rup is well, the one in the turban.

This raises an important question – can you have a boy band with less than four members? Don’t you need the cute one, the sensitive one, the goofy one, and the quiet one? I don’t really know how the band is marketed – do they double up attributes? Can one of them be cute and sensitive and the other one be goofy and quiet? I was never a teenage girl, so I don’t know how to answer such esoteric questions.

Musically, they’re also a bit different from a traditional boy band – they’re more of a desi/hip-hop fusion band that a traditional pop-ballad heavy quartet. This makes sense since their fan base is largely in the subcontinent:

While largely unknown in their home country of Canada, JoSH is extremely popular in South Asia, particularly in India and Pakistan. Their sophomore album, Kabhi, as well as its title track, remained in both Indian and MTV World Top 20 lists for 26 weeks from October 2004 to January 2005. Additionally, JoSH was awarded MTV India’s 2004 “Immie” award for Best New Non-Film Artist. [Link]

They may be getting their biggest break ever when they open for Nelly Furtado in Bombay New Years Eve as part of a 5 city tour. This is probably an outgrowth of their remix of Furtado’s Powerless that seems to have boosted their profile:

They come from Canada and their bhangra mix of Nelly Furtado’s “Powerless” has made them powerful. Soon after radio’s all over the planet started flooding the airwaves with Josh’s version of “Powerless,” the duo from Montreal started receiving offers from various artistes and labels. [Link]

I’m not crazy about most of their music – I like the idea of an Indo-Pakistani-Canadian boyband more than I like their execution. I like Mahi Ve, a song from their new album, better than some of their other material:

Continue reading →

Bangalore is about to have one of it’s largest live concerts ever, courtesy of aging 1970s rockers Deep Purple.

Who are/were Deep Purple? For our readers who like to listen to music originally recorded in their lifetime, Deep Purple were part of the the holy Trinity that founded Heavy Metal, along with Led Zepplin and Black Sabbath.

Their biggest hit was probably “Smoke on the Water” which reached #4 on the Billboard charts in 1972, and which is “#426 on Rolling Stone Magazine’s The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time”. If you’ve got a friend learning to play electric guitar, you’ve probably heard him or her attempt to play it, along with Stairway to Heaven.

It is commonly the first song learned by many beginner guitarists, it’s also noted for it’s extreme difficulty. However, it’s main recognisable riff is not difficult and consequently is constantly played by learners.
In fact, it’s so popular, that one famous guitar store in Denmark Street, London, used to sport a sign on the wall reading ‘If auditioning a guitar, please refrain from playing Smoke on the Water, as this is causing our staff mental torture’… [Link]

Events like this contribute to this peculiar retro-quality that parts of Indian culture have. I suppose it’s good that Indians still appreciate the retro given that they’re still receiving visits from bands whose biggest hits were over 30 years ago. Heck, Deep Purple first broke up in 1976.

Bangalore is the only Asian stop on the reconstituted band’s tour. The group will fly in from South America to play one night in India before flying on to Europe, so in some ways it’s a big deal.

But (and I’m wrinking my nose here) … don’t you think that India should be receiving more up to date acts now? I know that tickets are expensive for the average Indian, but Bangalore should have more than enough young employees of multinationals that they’re willing to pay something close to international prices for a ticket. Why is it that, despite India Rising and all that, that India attracts only 3rd string western bands on international tour? I’m sure I’m missing something.

Continue reading →