A fluid language that best echoes his mind and a passion that has carried him through troughs and crests of life for over two decades, music is all that and more for Susmit Sen. India’s guitar ‘sensation’ has trekked far in music and can now sit back and relax on his laurels, but no, the man wants the journey to go on, and that too in his signature style.
Twenty-three years with India’s pioneer alternate rock band Indian Ocean is behind him as a sea of varied hues of emotions and experience. The story of how he took a fancy to the guitar as a boy is famous.
Over the years, the guitar graduated from being a medium that could fetch him classified attention from the opposite sex to be an extension of his self. The Indian Ocean is past him now, and Susmit Sen Chronicles has been formed with Arun Gupta, Anirban Ghosh, Nikhil Vasudevan, Amit Sharma, and Sudhir Rikhari as the line-up. The band has already come out with the album, ‘Ocean to Ocean,’ which was packaged with Susmit’s memoir by the same title published by Harper Collins.
Susmit Sen was in Thiruvananthapuram to perform at the Park Centre for an event organised by the Indian Council of Cultural Relations and Natana, the cultural club of Technopark. When MetroPlus caught up with him, he was preparing to go for a break with his daughter to the backwaters. “Am looking forward to it,” he said. A break probably to recharge for the road ahead with the Susmit Sen Chronicles.
So, how much of a different voice would the Susmit Sen Chronicles be? “I don’t plan much,” he says. But a blueprint of the road ahead seemed lingering in his mind.
“Something that would involve varied kinds of music, inclusion of a variety of instruments,” he says. Like an orchestra? “Probably. If someone asks me, how will it be three years from now, I have no answer,” he says, justifying his reluctance to speak about the future.
But he is clear; there will be music in all its essence. “We can present what we have. Those who like it, can accept it. It is not that I am against playing for the masses. But mass opinion shouldn’t define music,” he says. The thought has been his defining point so far. To let his voice in music be heard more in his compositions, Susmit stopped listening to contemporaries or popular legends. “But there were some I couldn’t keep away from, like Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, Ali Akbar Khan, Nikhil Banerjee, and Mallikarjun Mansur,” he says.
Even during his hunt for good music as part of his HMV stint before he founded the Indian Ocean with Aseem Chakraborty, what he looked for was that uniqueness. “There is so much music in the country. I mostly worked with the Rajasthani folk artists. Probably that’s where the classical nuances came from,” he says.
The experience has shaped the dewy native touch that Indian Ocean’s music bore in its initial years. “We treated the voice like an instrument, letting music speak through different instruments.” It was a statement that music in its ethereal sense isn’t all about the lyrics. Lyrics has to merge into music and cannot be seen as a stand-alone, according to Susmit.
“Lyrics has come into play only since the last 200 years. Also, classical music in India lays emphasis on explanations of notes. One can get lost in it. And it is only when the musician finds himself so lost that he can transport the listener to a different sphere,” he says.
Such views on music were touted as the popular reasons why he quit Indian Ocean.
“It is past,” he skirts the topic. Susmit Sen Chronicles is his home now. “We will do good music and even films that fit our profile. Like the Indian Ocean did music for Black Friday . The positive aspect of the music scene in India is there are several groups trying things original,” he says, asserting that music is an untainted expression of natural emotions.
“If life forces me to earn more money to make ends meet, I would rather leave music and take up another job,” he says. He sits back in the strength of his conviction, something that has only grown with him all through the years he spent making and playing music.
