Those who wonder why Shahana Bajpaie’s second album took eight long years to hit the market must know good things need both long walks and long waits. And the euphonic experience each of the twelve songs in the collectionbrings you is totally worth it. As a teacher of Bengali Literature and Culture at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Shahana doesn’t want music to win her bread; rather she believes that music must vibrate in the memory even after the mellowing voices vanish.
Fusing contemporary music arrangements with traditional ones has always been Shahana’s thing. Her songs effortlessly bridge both sensibilities; probably because the songs are home! She dedicates this album to her mother and her three-year-old daughter Rohini who happens to know all the twelve songs by heart (and many more) as they have all been her lullabies as The songs Shahana records have all been with her since her childhood at Shantiniketan. She had known the roads and turns, alleys and avenues of Tagore’s tunes long enough. Therefore, she just knows it as soon as she hears the arrangement whether it suits a tune or not. And when it suits, the sources barely matter; it could be tambourine or tanpura or both along with tabla.
On the other hand, her songs effortlessly grew as she discussed and practiced them with friends who, like her, are very much into the music as well. And even the list of friends is also an example of fine fusion, including well acclaimed figures like music director Probuddha Banerjee, singer Shameek Sinha, mandolin player Diptangshu Roy from Kolkata, as well as English Jazz composer-pianist Zoe Rahman, clarinetist Idris Rahman, composer-guitarist Oliver Weeks from the UK. The arrangements in the album have employed almost anything and everything: ranging from ektara to violin and piano to mandolin.
Yet, none of them seems imposed. These songs neither need the tag of being ‘experimental’ to justify themselves to the purists, nor require deep musical knowledge in regular listeners to appreciate the mellow.
Shahana chose this time of the year for album-release out of sheer nostalgia, with the festivities and vacations at hand. Lose yourself in the songs’ offerings; you are bound to enjoy each morsel.