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On June 20th, 2014 Ottawa’s annual jazz festival started up for another season and of course there I was, standing under the soundboard tree along with any number of my festy friends. For this opening night we could have been forgiven for confusing the jazz fest with Ottawa’s annual Festival of India, as Canadian five-piece Indo-jazz-trad-experimentalists Autorickshaw were opening up for Bollywood singer Richa Sharma.
It amazes me that I’ve never been to India*. I love love love the food and wow, the music! My better days begin with an Indian raga in my ears…years ago I took a course on playing Indian classical music on the guitar and I got hooked so bad I bought an electric guitar/sitar with an extra drone neck (a Jerry Jones Supreme Sitar in gatorburst). Oh the hours I can spend on that thing! And you know, even most of the poppy Indian music I’ve heard falls somewhere between awesome and interesting to my unrefined palette. Oh, I’d love India all right. Of that I’m quite confident.
Anywho, Autorickshaw arranges Indian melodies incorporating jazz instrumentation that mostly decorates and highlights the Indian-ness of the music and rarely (as I recall) overpowers it. Which is to say you may on occasion forget that there is a Western influence in the music at all (though it is omnipresent) but you could never mistake the Indian roots of the group. Their set was mostly pretty amazing, peppered with the occasional over-popped syrupy Bollywood blooper that forced me to admit that there is probably a lot of Indian music that I still have to work up an appreciation for.
Speaking of which: Richa Sharma. I had never heard of her either but it seems she was one of Bollywood’s big musical celebrities so I suppose I was in the presence of greatness. But it was kind of like if Celine Dion was playing the main stage. Despite astronomical record sales and a massive fanbase I’m pretty sure Celine would have a hard time holding my attention for a full hundred minutes, and Richa Sharma didn’t either. Don’t get me wrong, I stuck around for a bunch of her set (the park is licensed after all) and I actually quite liked it, for what it was. But to me what it was was a traditional sound that I adore steeped in a soft-pop filter that diluted the flavour almost to the point of losing it. Almost, but not quite, for running throughout Sharma’s synth-bass Casio pop songs were the same ancient-sounding haunting scalar adventures that make my good mornings so much better.
But still. Even if Celine Dion was covering Frank Zappa songs I’m not sure I would have made it through her entire set. And yes, the very thought of it made me shudder too. Sorry ‘bout that.
The OLG late-night tent aftershow was following the theme too, offering a set by “the Ambassador of Bhangra”: DJ Rekha. But Richa’s set forced me offsite early so DJ Rekha remains a mystery. Maybe I’ll see her performing in India some day?
*It’s because of my dear cat Chilly Willy. M’lady and I had made a solid plan to spend six months in India – I would enrol in intensive sitar lessons and she would take cooking classes – and afterwards we were gonna cool our heels for another two months somewhere cheap and out-of-the-way in Thailand. It’s not like we had bought plane tickets or anything but dates had been circled on calendars; it was that serious. And then a cute little starving two-year-old tuxedo cat showed up in our neighbour’s backyard and captured our souls. There was no way we could leave poor little Willy for eight months! Are you kidding me?!?!? Nope, our India plans would have to wait. As of this writing it’s been thirteen years and the little fellah still hasn’t moved out.
Todd Man Out 