GUY BUTTERY - ONE NIGHT IN GURAGON

Towards the end of 2019, Mohd. Amjad Khan, Mudassir Khan and I were scheduled to rehearse just outside of Delhi four hours before our opening concert. We had never met before, let alone made any music together. Whilst our allotted rehearsal time was cutting it a bit fine, we had been “practising” via voice recordings and texting somewhere between Hindi and English to break down various parts of the set. Due to Delhi traffic, our intended dry run was shaved right down to a single 60 minutes giving us just enough time to shake hands, share a chai and tune our instruments. As a result we went in totally blind to that first concert yet what unfolded on stage over the next hour left me in complete awe. So much so that after our performance I immediately set about asking anyone who would listen how we could track down a local studio to capture our newly formed trio. As luck would have it, the very place where we had performed that first night (Eastwind Academy for Advanced Music & Performance) had a basic recording set-up. The only problem was they had never recorded anything there before. With limited time together and an already crammed schedule, we somehow managed to secure a single morning to record. The synchronicities of this encounter and the unexpected studio session that followed, immediately reminded me of a previous trip to the subcontinent.

My first brush with India and its myriad of landscapes and musical wonders was at the age of 21 when I arrived in the country for an undetermined length of time. Back then, I was scheduled to meet two close friends in the South with a vague plan to head in a Northerly direction. The whole trip was discussed over one singular long distance telephone call whilst each of us looked over our respective maps (which in my case was a globe of the Earth). We arranged to meet at that place somewhere on the lower end of the map that began with the letter “T” followed by mouthful of syllables. It turns out we were referring to Thiruvananthapuram. A loose plan indeed but somehow we all landed up at the same place and began what turned out to be a 3 month, 6700km (4100 miles) trip across the country.

We opted to share a double bed for the three of us most nights and split all our meals so we could go a little further for a little longer. We stowawayed on train rooftops through the Punjab, bathed in mountain top hot springs in the snowfall, played endless Uno games, sampled the local dysentery, hitched rides on the roofs of very, very tired old buses, home-stayed with the “untouchables” in the Himalayas, slept on the beaches and once scored a $1 room with “aircon” which consisted of a hole in the wall with a blizzard blowing through which we shared with a dog. The dog responded to the name “Watkynd”. Whilst the many wild tales of those misadventures could fill many an album sleeve, I don’t believe any of my prior or subsequent travels have impacted and shaped me as much as that trip did. I came back a vegetarian, 10kgs lighter, with a severe case of lockjaw and a deep love for a land, its people and its intoxicating music.

Whilst I’ve been fortunate to return to India since that seminal journey (mostly as a “mule” taking Bollywood long players to Delhi to subsidise return visits to the Himalayas), it was only at the end of 2019 that I was first invited to perform in the country. On a previous trip, I’d been asked by a friend to bring some drum skins back to South Africa for him and, as a result, was introduced to (although did not physically meet) tabla master, Amjad Khan. We exchanged a few messages and promised to connect when I was next in Delhi. Not long after I was contacted by one Yaduveer Singh Thakur about doing a nationwide tour through the Motherland. I was well pleased. Being overly obsessed with the Indian box cello, the sarangi, I asked Amjad if he knew anyone who played the instrument and, as a result, I was connected with Mudassir Khan who came highly recommended. A few emails later, we were officially a touring band.

It seems impossibly fortuitous that the celestials and traffic gods aligned to allow “One Morning in Gurgaon” to be. All the music you hear contained within is the result of singular takes. Time didn’t allow for more. Amjad chose what songs we would play. Our rendition of “Raag Yaman” presented here was the first and only time we ever played it together. Mudassir gave me a skeleton idea of the raga in spoken word and what unfolded is what you hear here. Everything else was almost certainly telepathic. I was well aware of the intuition and openness in the room that consequential morning in Gurgaon. I feel incredibly humbled to have shared in sound with these two masters and am forever grateful to them both for their profound musicianship, their warm hearts and their spontaneous spirits.