Amit Chaudhuri: This is not fusion [19:00, 17/10/2023]

When: 19:00, 17/10/2023
Where: ECA West Court, 74 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh
What: A performance by Amit Chaudhuri with Graeme Stephen, Matt Hodges, Fraser Fifield 
UNESCO Week of Sound events are free, book a ticket.

This event is part of the James Tait Black Visiting Writer Programme, generously funded by a previous winner of the James Tait Black Prize.

Amit Chaudhuri will be performing compositions from a celebrated musical-conceptual project he started as a composer, vocalist, and improviser in 2005, which he called, in its early days, ‘not fusion’. The first of his three recordings in the project was actually called This is Not Fusion (2007); the second Found Music (2010), borrowing from the term ‘found object’; and the third, Across the Universe, was released this year. Of it, Peter Culshaw said in Songlines and Gramophone magazines: ‘The way he destroys boundaries is liberating, a triumph of free-thinking’. 

Amit is a leading novelist, essayist, poet, and musician. Among the prizes his fiction and non-fiction have received are the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the Government of India’s Sahitya Akademi Award, the Infosys Prize, and the James Tait Black Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

His North Indian classical recordings were first released in the 1990s by HMV in India; his experiments in ‘not fusion’, in which he brought jazz, blues, and other kinds music together with the raga, were released by Times Music and EMI in India, and Babel Label in the UK. The second CD in this genre, Found Music, was on allaboutjazz.com‘s Editor’s Picks for 2010. ‘Summertime’, from his first album, was one of the versions of Gershwin’s composition featured on BBC 4’s Gershwin’s Summertime: The Song that Conquered the World. He has also been a featured artist on various flagship UK radio and TV shows, including Loose Ends and BBC 2’s Review Show. 

He wrote the libretto for Ravi Shankar’s opera, Sukanya, and sang and read from his work in 2019 as part of the finale of the London Review of Book‘s 40th anniversary celebrations at Queen Elizabeth Hall.

The West Bengal government conferred the Sangeet Samman on him for his contribution to North Indian classical music in 2018.

His book, Finding the Raga (2021), about his relationship with North Indian classical music, won the James Tait Black Prize in 2022.

This concert is hosted in collaboration with the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh.