A Bollywood film composer who seldom gets to write a love song and a classical percussion maestro who loves stepping out of his comfort zone are sent on a blind date to Sri Lanka.
The rest is the plot of music and travel show The Dewarists’ season 5 finale episode, featuring Amit Trivedi and V. Selvaganesh exploring, jamming, composing and recording a song called “Panchiyaa”.
Selvaganesh, the kanjira master who has performed in both fusion and classical settings, said he immediately looked up Amit Trivedi when he was told they were to fly to Sri Lanka.
“Nowadays, it is easy. You just type a name and you get everything. When I heard his songs – he has a new concept of composing. As a musician, we always look for hunger, to get something new, innovative. He has that hunger, I felt from his music. He is such a great musician to work with.”
Trivedi, for his part, had already seen Selvaganesh in action.
The singer and composer behind films such as Dev.D and Queen , caught a performance of fusion forerunners Remember Shakti, featuring guitar veteran John McLaughlin, vocalist Shankar Mahadevan, tabla maestro Zakir Hussain, the late Mandolin Srinivas and of course, Selvaganesh. Trivedi recalls, “His playing blew my mind. What an amazing talent. When I got to know that I would collaborate with him, I was thrilled. I jumped with excitement, yet I was nervous. Because I thought, ‘What kind of song can I make to match up to a musician of that calibre?’”
While Trivedi admits there were some inhibitions when it comes to collaborating for the first time, there was also excitement. “There’s always a question mark, about how we’ll gel and whether we’ll like what we’re doing. Until you meet and start jamming, you won’t know the reality. Once we do that, we know the connection and your heart tells you, ‘this is going to work’,” he says.
For someone like Selvaganesh, of a mind that often improvises everything from cars honking to beats, the idea of travel and having the right setting to create a breezy, light-headed song like ‘Panchiyaa’ was important. “Environment is really important for the music to come up with something new,” he says. And Trivedi, who is also well-travelled between composing music and touring, says he took this as a chance to write on love. He explains, “I’ve written very few love songs in my life. The kind of films I’ve done – Dev.D , Udta Punjab and Dear Zindagi – there were not love stories happening as such. I did Fitoor, Lootera, Wake Up Sid ; in Udaan and Aamir there were no girls! I had no chance. I was deprived of this.”
So it was a blind date that was more like a holiday, then – to be given a free hand to make any kind of music. But Trivedi does joke about the one un-holiday-like condition set by The Dewarists’ producers. He laughs, “I’m sure even Selva sir will agree with me on this, it was a holiday except for the fact that we had to be up at 5:30 every morning to shoot. We both hated it, except that everything was holiday.”
Shot among beaches and shores of various locations in Sri Lanka, Selvaganesh lauds that the video team’s vision was very close to his musical idea of a sprawling sound. He recalls, “They were hearing the song and sequencing it visually, in terms of frames. If you notice, the video has a lot of wide shots, because the song needs that. When I was recording the song, I was thinking of exactly that. They’re amazing.”
So satisfying was the collaboration that in between their separate tours, Selvaganesh’s plans to set up a music school for the underprivileged and Trivedi’s film work for projects such as Rukh , the Aamir Khan-starrer Secret Superstar and Vikramaditya Motwane’s Bhavesh Joshi , the duo are planning an album. Selvaganesh adds, “We’ve planned for a tour, because that is a new combination. He is a Bollywood musician and I’m from a classical background. It’s nice to work with musicians from different styles and to come up with a different dimension of music.”
