In April 2009, Arun Ghosh was invited to perform at the jazzahead! Festival in Bremen, Germany as part of the UK showcase presented by Jazz Services. He was selected for the 4th edition of the Jerwood/PRS Foundation ‘Take Five’ initiative for emerging jazz musicians produced by Serious in 2008. Conceived in Calcutta, bred in Bolton, matured in Manchester and now living in London, Arun Ghosh’s musical vocabulary and vision reflects his rich geographical heritage. Using the spirit and language of jazz, with the sounds and styles of hip-hop, Indian classical and folk, western classical, rock, pop and avant-garde, Arun’s music is full of lyrical melodies and searching harmonies, down to earth directness and psychedelic ambient introspection. His Indo-Jazz sextet play original music of South Asian origin with a contemporary jazz attitude, rocking urban beats and the passion of punk. Sweet and timeless melodies give birth to soaring improvisations and raag explorations, driven by a heady mix of dub-reggae bass, tabla trickery and ferocious drum explosions. Arun Ghosh’s debut album,”Northern Namaste”,released in April 2008, showcases clarinet-led orchestration, currently under-exploited terrain within the contemporary jazz/world music lexicon. Utilising unorthodox time signatures, the vocabulary of raags, folk rhythms and hip-hop bravado, Northern Namaste displays a kaleidoscope of sounds - urgent, meditative, erotic and heartfelt. Whilst Arun’s playing encompasses the raw energy and aggression of Miles Davis’s Dark Magus, the sonic diversity of multi-reedsman, Yusef Lateef, and recalls the spirituality of both John and Alice Coltrane’s Indo-Jazz excursions, his cinematic arrangements cover territories travelled by Brian Eno, A R Rahman, and Abdullah Ibrahim. Yet, Arun Ghosh treads his own path, transcending traditional music genre boundaries, with a Mancunian swagger through jazz-noir aural landscapes to a new 21st Century global acoustic destination. With Arun Ghosh as ‘Pied Piper’, “Northern Namaste” represents the renaissance of clarinettist as lead man. |
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