All India Radio Signature Tune by tajmahalfoxtrot1
Preparing to moderate a conversation earlier this week with the writer-musician Amit Chaudhuri about his new book on Calcutta, I revisited his This Is Not Fusion album — and remembered that he had also recorded a tune called All India Radio. The source material for Amit’s melody was the All India Radio theme song, composed, as this article noted last fortnight, by a Jewish refugee named Walter Kaufmann.
The music on the This Is Not Fusion album, as Amit explained in his liner notes, aims to move “towards a musical and conceptual meeting point, a space in which not only musicians encounter each other but in which musical lineages intersect and renovate themselves and become altered by this contact”.
Writing about All India Radio, he notes, “Earlier on during this project, the tune of the All India Radio theme came back to me, but redrawn in the raga Marwa. So it was not so much the original tune but my reinvention of it that was echoing in my head; and I’d set it instinctively to Marwa perhaps because this beautiful raga is sung in the early evening — and the early evening is when I usually used to hear, from childhood onward, that mysterious theme tune, announcing that mysterious theme tune, announcing that radio services were to resume once more.
After I told Amit about Kaufmann’s role in creating the theme, he replied, “Now the tune makes a lot of sense, and why, when I would hear East European buskers play in Berlin, I would often want to have them play with me in my version of AIR. The subterranean, tremulous East European, slightly folksy sound of the theme now becomes clearer to my ear.”
Amit then pointed me to another interpretation of Kaufmann’s tune, this one by the American composer Carla Bley. It was on her ambitious debut, a two-hour-long, triple-album called Escalator Over the Hill. She took three years to record the project, starting from 1968. It featured stellar musicians, including the trumpet player Don Cherry, the bassist Charlie Haden and guitar player John McLaughlin. Though it’s commonly referred to as a jazz opera, Bley and her collaborator, the lyricist Paul Hines, described Escalator Over the Hill as a “chronotransduction”, whatever that means. (All India Radio appears on Side Five of the album, and is followed by the rock-driven Rawalpindi Blues.)
UPDATE
After this piece was uploaded, Rajesh Devraj, filmmaker and writer extraordinaire, wrote in to point out another AIR-inspired tune. This one is by Swiss/Dutch singer and composer Susanne Abbuehl. In addition to studying jazz, she studied North Indian classical vocal music with Dr Indurama Srivastava in Amsterdam and later became a student of famed master singer Dr. Prabha Atre in Bombay, to whom she regularly returns. She has made two recordings for ECM, April (2001), and Compass (2006). This tune, AIR, is on her first album.
