When English guitar icon and the 1993 winner of Guitarist Magazine’s Guitarist of The Year, Guthrie Govan says, “If you don’t know about Prasanna, prepare to be terrified; he plays like nobody on the planet,” he is referring to the ace Indian guitarist-composer’s latest album.
Prasanna’s latest effort, All Terrain Guitar (ATG), just released to worldwide acclaim.
AR Rahman, alongside whom Prasanna performed at the United Nations as a tribute to MS Subbulakshmi, is just as euphoric. The Academy Award-winning musician says: “Prasanna’s ‘Springtime in New York’ (the album’s opening track) is as beautiful as chilling out in Central Park and having a masala dosa.”
Prasanna himself feels ATG has the soul to touch people in a simple, direct, and powerful way.
Coming out with a new record is about welcoming new listeners to his world as well as reconnecting with his loyal fans. “For me, the keyword is love… and some sustained feedback on the overdrive pedal,” he says, likening ATG to the thrilling world of ATVs (all-terrain vehicles) and SUVs (sport utility vehicles). The nine songs from the album are an amalgam of the triple-genre guitarist’s style that straddles, very comfortably, the unique worlds of jazz, Carnatic and fusion.
Named among the Top 50 Creative Indians by Open Magazine in 2010, Prasanna is the quintessential Indian Renaissance man. He’s a guitarist and composer whose prolific body of work is as diverse as it is inclusive. After the jazz-fusion album Be The Change (2004) and Jimi Hendrix-inspired Electric Ganesha Land (EGL), Prasanna took 10 years to come up with ATG.
Between his last two albums several things kept him busy. The musician had taken up the position of president of the Swarnabhoomi Academy of Music in Chennai. The two bands he is associated with, Raga Bop Trio and Tirtha, required his time for recordings and tours. “Most importantly, I was introspecting a lot…it was time to move forward from just being a solo performer to collaborative projects,” he says.
ATG was recorded almost at one go, so to speak, and has been ready for quite some time. Prasanna calls it his most intensely personal recording to date. “I just didn’t know if I was ready to share it with the world. I had to age with it and wait till the inner voice told me: now is the time!”
Prasanna is equally comfortable playing purist jazz, classical Carnatic and an eclectic fusion of the two. But, he sees himself as composer/performer instead of being slotted into any strict genres. “I am beyond styles and all I seek is expressing music in my most individualistic way. For instance, I rarely play jazz the way other people expect me to. Of course, the way I express Carnatic or jazz will be different from, say, the blues. The feeling is similar, but the expression is different. I want my audience to listen and catch on to the emotive quality; as artistes, we should just do music and let it speak in its natural tongue,” he explains.
Besides Raga Bop Trio (with Steve Smith and George Brooks), Tirtha (with Vijay Iyer and Nitin Mitta), Prasanna is currently experimenting with newer sounds: hard rocking metal, with Raga Metal Conversations, featuring Anton Fig on guitar and Alex Skonick on drums, besides himself. “In each of these bands, there are vast elements of compositional inputs brought in by other musicians and thereby, the songs and performances become very collaborative and creative,” says Prasanna.
“The other members of each of these bands are all world-class performers in their own capacity and have, in turn, played with several international acts. When we perform together, it is a sound that is unique to us and these cannot be slotted into any genre, although there will be a lean towards either Carnatic, jazz, rock or fusion,” Prasanna says.
Musicians joining Prasanna on All Terrain Guitar include Shalini Lakshmi and Natalie John (vocals), Vijay Iyer (piano), Dave Douglas (trumpet), Rudresh Mahanthappa and David Binney (saxophone), Mike Pope and Bill Urmson (bass), and Rodney Holmes and Mauricio Zottarelli (drums).
Prasanna cites the influence of two legendary composers, Ilaiyaraja and Frank Zappa. “The love for form and structure I developed from Ilaiyaraja’s music and the outlandish creativity and musical blasphemy that I have associated Frank Zappa’s music with, is probably reflected in ‘Pinch Pennies in Monaco’ (a track from ATG),” he says. There are mini-stories and episodes built into it and there is no way to explain why one musical interlude leads into another with so many layers of raga s coming in and going. According to him, Ilaiyaraja and Zappa are talented composers/performers who can do so many things within a song. “This is an area that I am slowly heading into and ATG’s songs reflect that evolution,” says the musician.
The author is a freelance writer
Visit guitarprasanna.com for details on orderingAll Terrain Guitar
