In the market of Jodhpur, India, among all the overwhelming sights and sounds spread out below Mehrangarh Fort, sellers display textiles with their brilliant colors and designs, often so perfect in their imperfections. They caught the eye of Anita Katakkar, the tabla-playing leader of Rakkatak, as she visited, and the beauty of the fragments of cloth she saw gave her the title of the band’s third album. Small Pieces (released April 14, 2017) is, she says, a collection of the stories they’ve absorbed along the way.
“Like the fabrics, nothing is ever quite perfect when you make an album, and everything is stitched together with different threads,” Katakkar explains. “It felt like it summed up everything we’d been doing so well.”
Based in Toronto, Canada, Rakkatak began as a solo project in 2009 for Katakkar, working with her tabla, a laptop, and a sequencer to create a highly personal mix of classical Indian music and electronica. But with the addition of bassist Oriana Barbato and sitar player Rex Van der Spuy, Rakkatak’s focus shifted a little, making music whose heart remains grounded in the Indian tradition, but whose head is firmly fixed in the 21st century.
“My ancestry is Indian and Scottish,” Katakkar says, “and I heard plenty of Indian music growing up from my grandmother; that’s what started me. I began studying tabla here in Canada, then spent time in India learning more. Then I spent 10 years as a member of the Toronto Tabla Ensemble. But once musicians like Talvin Singh and Tabla Beat Science started changing the way people heard Indian music, I began to explore the possibilities they opened up. I saw where I wanted to take the music. We had stories to tell.”
read more at: http://rakkatak.flipswitchpr.com/dispatch/21609/9NBloqWFV_ud81-exbeu2A?storyamp_track=9784
0 Comments:
Post a Comment