Seven Steps - British Music with an Indian accent
“When I speak, you can’t take out the Indian from my voice. I’m speaking English but there is an accent. That’s how I define my music.” - Shri, April 2008, London.
One of the highlights of A Great Night At The Spitz, a gala concert held last October to celebrate the achievements of the much-loved east London venue before its closure was the appearance of Bombay born Croydon based Shri.
This was not insignificant when one considers that the bill included Beth Orton, Seb Rochford and Soweto Kinch among others. Although best known as a virtuoso bassist and tabla player, Shri took to the stage with a bansuri flute. Within a few minutes the audience was mesmerized by a display of rhythmic and textural trickery that saw him create double time ‘Jungle’ basslines and drum beats by entwining his voice with the flute’s fuzzy low notes. Shri drew a virtual band from the air he breathed.
This independent thinking and imagination are given free reign on his new album Seven Steps, his first recording since 2005’s East Rain. In the interim Shri has been working with the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, west London on a production of the epic Ramayana as well as writing original material with collaborators like the singer Fola.
Shri was in the producer’s chair for East Rain and feels that he has grown into that role with greater confidence on Seven Steps. He played practically all of the instruments heard on the album – bass, flutes, keys, percussion, drums – but exercised great discipline in the way he helmed his creativity, sometimes reining in the improvisational urges in order to make the most communicative album possible.
Most of the compositions on Seven Steps started life by Shri ‘doodling’ with a bassline or drum loop, letting a theme or melodic fragment emerge before refining the initial idea. At various junctures a few other players were called in: JC-001 rapped on Barbed Wire Butterfly, Marc Layton-Bennett played drums on Mad B-Line and Grant Windsor electric piano on Onwards but the most prominent presence on Seven Steps is that of Fola, who adds a majestic vocal to several songs.
What defines the album is life experience, an evocation of authentic feelings known first hand rather than a series of emotional clichés. Casting an uncompromisingly honest eye over his place in the world, Shri has made 11 tracks that convey a certain amount of desolation as well as defiant energy in response to the challenges facing the average citizen trying to rationalize the increasingly crazy everyday merry-go-round.
Musically, Shri has sought to strike a balance between his ample ability on a range of instruments and a skilled songwriter’s self-discipline. There is a harmonic clarity to Seven Steps, a use of only the most essential chords and counterpoint so as not to overload the sound. Rhythmically, one hears great richness, which is not surprising given Shri’s training as a tabla player but the pieces are largely in 4/4. When appropriate he may opt for uneven time like a seven beat cycle but the more complex meter is only deployed to serve the emotional narrative.
Seven Steps thus marks a significant stage of development for an artist whose tremendous talent and wealth of ideas have always made him a noteworthy figure on the British music scene. Moreover this new work presents a more reflective, meditative side of Shri that stems from his desire to engage with the world as he sees it, in its basic, quotidian reality, to look into his own heart and mind and reveal what he sees with no concession to mainstream points of view.
