A guitar veteran’s new album showcases his artistic dexterity
Amyt Datta
Amyt Datta won’t recall the instance, but this writer had once accompanied a friend to the veteran Kolkata guitarist’s Miss Havisham-like house for a guitar class he was conducting. We had reached at the fag end of the lesson, but his parting words to his students stayed imprinted in this gatecrasher’s brain even two decades after that evening. He’d told them, “If you want to play the guitar, you have to practise, practise and practise. You have to have the instrument beside you when you eat, when you sleep or when you’re watching TV.” What he meant is that like there is no rest for the wicked, there is no rest for the guitarist either in the pursuit of artistic excellence.
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Well, the good thing is that Datta clearly practises what he preaches, given the musical mastery he displays on Red Plant, his latest album. It’s a wholly acoustic affair for which he brought drummer Jivraj Singh, guitarist Arinjoy Sarkar and bassist Akash Ganguly on board. And like it has been with his previous records, this one, too, shuns lyrics completely. Datta explains, “As guitarists, we have our own words. It’s a different language. I mean, like the vocals can act like an instrument, an instrument can also act like a voice. It’s just that when you have words in a song — like when you say, ‘I love you’ or ‘I hate you’ — it’s easier to understand it. But here, the listener has to be a bit educated to get what we are saying. That’s why when you have a band with vocals, there will be 100 people in the audience and when it’s only instrumental music, there will be 20.”
Either way, the sonic ambience that Datta builds in Red Plant accommodates many different moods. The track Yusra, for example, begins in the manner of a person waking up in bed in the morning and lazing around for a bit, before opening the curtains to let the sunlight in and taking a shot of black coffee to kick-start the day’s proceedings. Datta tells us that he likes mixing and matching different global sounds like Spanish, Arabic, and Mediterranean, and even a bit of Indian influences to build a new medium of listening to music. That takes a certain level of dexterity to accomplish, which the veteran has accomplished over the years with — you guessed it — practice, practice and practice.
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