Slide Guitarist Prakash Sontakke is amongst the 300 ‘Essential Guitarists of Modern Times’, according to the 2015 list of the world renowned guitarist, composer and writer Miguel Copon from Spain. This is an appreciation “where world music recognises the artist” in every known Western music platform. Prakash Sontakke figures in Copon’s ‘13 Questions’ interview that familiarises the selected 300 Essential Names in Modern Guitar to the world, covering each one’s creative tweaks that has brought about their instrument design and stylistic interpretations.
“The Slide Guitar inherently lends itself to infinite styles of play. And with my observations, even in our Western music presentations at school, I knew that a lot can be done to bring a familiar approach to Indian music on the guitar. With my thinking cap on most of the time and with my mother Mani Sontakke, a Hawaiian Guitarist around, I brought over a re-design to the Slide Guitar and called it the Swara Veena,” says Sontakke.
His rectangular shaped instrument has 6 main strings, 2 for drone and 13 sympathetic strings, totalling 21 strings as against 6 in the original Slide Guitar.
Copon’s world listing is an admiration for Sontakke’s instrument design that has enabled him to ‘slide across’ genres for a bandwidth that includes diverse elements from multifarious approaches covering Blues, Country Music, Western Symphonies, and his own “ambient style” that includes the Indian classical too. Although Sontakke has been in the reckoning with Independent Music Awards for the last 10 years, his 2012 mega-hit Progressive-ambient-electronic-Jazz album “Mercurial Balm” released in Norway by the German label ECM received a record online feedback setting a defining pre-cursor to his latest inclusion in the Essential Guitarists’ league. What most people would have missed is Sontakke’s name as co-composer in “Winds of Samsara” — the Grammy Award winning album by Ricky Kej and South African flautist Wouter Kellerman.
