‘Not Fusion’: Indian Classical Music, The Blues, and Other Soundscapes

Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, poet, critic, and musician. He has won several prizes for his fiction, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Government of India’s Sahitya Akademi Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. He is a trained and critically acclaimed singer in the North Indian classical tradition. HMV  India released two recordings by him in this genre. In 2004, he conceptualised a project in experimental music. His first CD of experimental music, This Is Not Fusion, was released in Britain on the award-winning independent jazz label, Babel Label. His second CD, Found Music, came out from Babel Label and EMI. It was an allaboutjazz.com Editor’s Choice of 2010. He has been a featured artiste on flagship culture programmes on television and radio in the UK, including the Review Show (BBC 2), Late Junction (Radio 3), and Loose Ends (Radio 4). His version of ‘Summertime’ was featured on the BBC 4 television documentary, Gershwin’s Summertime: the Song that Conquered the World, alongside classic versions by Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Mahalia Jackson, Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald.