INTERVIEW: Anupam Shobhakar dips into ‘Liquid Reality’ on latest release
Photo: Anupam Shobhakar’s new album is called Liquid Reality. Photo courtesy of Lori Lea Photography / Provided by Cindy Byram PR with permission.
Celebrated guitarist Anupam Shobhakar is back with a new album called Liquid Reality, out today, March 14, on AGS Recordings. The musician, who grew up in India but now lives in Brooklyn, New York, draws on many different sonic influences for the new recording effort. For him, the project began approximately one year ago.
“Well, it started with having ideas to do a new record,” Shobhakar said in a recent phone interview. “My friend, Joel Harrison, runs AGS Recordings, a small little guitar company with some really, really fantastic guitar artists. We were talking about me doing another solo recording album, and it sort of started with that process. I had some of these ideas sitting on my hard drive for a while, in terms of little snippets of song ideas and pieces and little guitar cadenzas and riffs and stuff like that. Basically I started to put it together from day one, and then my wife was talking about me doing a lot of instrumental music [since] I moved to New York City in 2012. Since then, it’s been a lot of instrumental albums, and the idea of having Indian vocals on a record was her idea. From day one, we started to think about how to do that, and that’s how the process started really.”
The resulting album features several interesting, unique songs — some with those promised Indian vocals, which are beautifully realized with Shobhakar’s guitar work. For example, the album opener is called “Anjaneya,” which features both fretted and fretless guitar playing, according to press notes. Another tune, “Ladders to the Sky” has obvious Brazilian influences, while “Formless” is addictively transfixing (see the video below). What brings everything together on the album is that dizzying display of the guitar.
“It’s mainly a guitar-focused record,” he said. “It features quite an eclectic mix of ideas for sure.”
Shobhakar began the recording process in earnest by writing music at his home studio. He begins not on the guitar but on the piano, putting ideas together and seeing what may work for the final recording. As the concepts began to form, he started to think of musical collaborators who could join him on this journey. He would build charts and notations, and then send the documents off to his friends, gauging their interest. Spoiler alert: They were interested.
“Then we set up the dates for the studio, and these guys are amazing pros in the studio world as well,” Shobhakar said. “It was relatively painless for this one actually. … Because the record traverses into this fusion and crossover type of thing, it’s important for this type of project and for me to have had recruited these musicians that were sort of musically bilingual and even trilingual. Indian music features pretty heavily traditional classical Indian music, and then of course there’s the jazz side. And there’s a heavy rock thing to it, so musicians that are just very versatile in terms of their skill sets can speak more than a couple of musician languages. That was really important to this.”
The guitarist is especially proud of that opening track, “Anjaneya,” which is definitely a rock tune, almost bordering on the edge of Frank Zappa. Shobhakar likes to use the term prog rock when describing the tune. One of the reasons the track feels so strong is because of percussionist Swaminathan SelvaGanesh, whose father played with many musical greats, including Shakti, John McLaughlin and Ustad Zakir Hussain’s ensemble.
“Swami is just a prodigy on the kanjeera, a South Indian frame drum,” he said. “The idea was to have this piece with a lot of interesting nonlinear rhythms. A lot of odd-time signatures were woven into these new riffs that formed a dialogue centrally with him and me, with the double-necked guitar and the kanjeera sort of going back and forth, with these interesting riffs and ideas. And then it was built around the other musicians, Satoshi Takeishi, a great Japanese American drummer-percussionist in the school of Jamey Haddad and people like that, and then of course the fantastic Utsav Lal is playing piano on this — another musician who is sort of musically trilingual when it comes to his musical skill sets. He is extremely proficient in Indian music as well as jazz and classical music. It was sort of built with the backbone or the spine … with this Indian percussionist in the center with the guitars, and then these guys, the pianist and Satoshi, formed more of a foil around the sound.”
Shobhakar added: “It goes through a lot of interesting arrangements. … There’s a drum tradeoff in between. There’s a fretless guitar solo. There are these cool piano solos, which are playing through interesting harmony, interesting time signatures, so that’s the idea behind the piece.”
To hear the new songs in a live setting, including “Anjaneya,” check out Shobhakar’s upcoming album release concert, set for April 10 at Joe’s Pub in Downtown Manhattan.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Anupam Shobhakar’s new album is called Liquid Reality, out now from AGS Recordings. Click here for more information.
