The world is her stage

City-based musician Charu Hariharan is going places with world music band Världens

Charu Hariharan Photo: Olof Grind

For Carnatic, Hindustani or even folk musicians, stage diving – that act of leaping from a concert stage into the crowd below, perfected by rockers of the likes of Iggy Pop and Jim Morrison – is not part of performance procedure. Well, it is if you are Charu Hariharan. The spunky vocalist and instrumentalist, who hails from the city, found her inner rock chick recently as she leapt off the stage, safely into the waiting arms of the 3,000-strong crowd at the Urkult folk music fete in Sweden! Charu accomplished the feat – a first in her career – during a performance of multicultural, multi-ethnic world music band Världens, for which she plays the mridangam and the ganjira.

Indeed, life has lately been a series of such musical highs for Charu, who is just back from an extensive tour of Sweden with the band. “It’s an incredible feeling, just letting yourself go and trusting those in the crowd to catch you. Prior to the concert, we were all given pointers on how to stage dive. The energy on and off the stage was so fever pitch that you just leap without thinking too much about it. It was like floating…,” gushes Charu, even as she packs her bags for the band’s upcoming tour of the United Kingdom in October.

Charu, a graduate in psychology, first rose to fame as a contestant on Amrita TV’s reality show

Superstar . She is trained in Carnatic and Hindustani music, has sung a handful of playback songs, has several compositions to her credit, and is part of several local bands. A few years ago Charu was one of the only three Indians chosen for Ethno, an annual international music camp that was held in Rättvik, Sweden. The friendships that were forged there became Världens (meaning, world in Swedish).

The band was first brought together in early autumn of 2012 by the Swedish folk band Kolonien ‘as an experiment to create a new folk music band with people from different cultural and economic backgrounds.’ “For me, associating with Världens has opened up vast spaces of music and even more space for personal development and exploration,” says Charu. Besides the songstress, there are 13 other musicians from across Europe, Asia and Africa in the band, which weaves music that is “primarily acoustic in nature.”

The band uses a mix of instruments, namely, recorders, bagpipes, flute, clarinet, saxophone, mandolin, mandola, guitar, base guitar, violins, melodeon (akin to an accordion), cora (which is like a harp), percussions such as cajon, djembe, darbuka, kick drum, mridangam, and ganjira and a few ambient percussions like shakers, cymbals. “The ganjira is a versatile instrument because of its frequency range that traverses from base to treble. Incorporating a pitch instrument like the mridangam, on the other hand, is a bit difficult and you have to adjust according to the sruthi. Then again, it’s relatively easy to adapt Indian music to any form of music because it’s perhaps the only genre of music where we learn to play the syllables on the instrument and vocally too,” says Charu.

The band was initially guided in arrangements by Ale Moller, a three-time Grammy Award-winner, widely acknowledged as the face of folk music in Sweden. “He always appreciates our idea of bringing such different and independent traditions together,” says Charu.

The novelty of the differences and different sounds notwithstanding, the beauty of the band’s music is that they use traditional compositions and also their own compositions and arrange it in such a way that each of these instruments gets their own creative space. “Although there exists a lot of differences among us as individuals hailing from varied traditions, cultures and continents, particularly when communicating with each other, we stand together against all odds, understanding and respecting each other. During the tour of Sweden, for example, the entire band stayed together cooking for ourselves and sharing a large part of our lives. What fascinates me more is that the whole concept of Världens promotes the band as a whole, instead of individual artistes. This keeps the band cohesive and strong, taking up the cause of music rather than our own individual excellence or rather show space. We all want to be known by our band's name and not vice versa, which is quite rare these days. The idea behind the band is to promote love and togetherness through music and we stand to reflect this ideal,” she says.

Världens has already come out with their debut album and are scheduled for gigs in Italy and Germany in 2015. A tour of India too is on the anvil.

In another musical high, Charu is also getting together with instrumentalists Peter Rousu and Patrick Andersson for ganjira-guitar-fiddle trio. Meanwhile, on the home front too the youngster is on a roll. She’s composed two songs for the upcoming 45-minute short Jo.We.Lo made by a bunch of youngsters from the city. She has also composed the music and done the programming of the upcoming Malayalam feature film Infiniti . “It’s a psychological thriller involving three different people, each with different personalities and each with different themes. So, music is a very important part of the narrative,” she says. Rock on Charu!