This album sounds like a jazz boat sailing across the Bay of Bengal

The Three Seas, Antahkarana

★★★★

What a great title. Antahkarana – the latest instalment of The Three Seas’ 13-year voyage into a previously uncharted fusion of traditional Bengali music, jazz, dub, pop and more – is Sanskrit for “inner instrument”. This refers to the place inside us where memory, intuition, identity and soul converge. Add the hearts and intellects of the band members – three Bengalis and two Australians – and you have all the ingredients for music that digs deep beneath the surface of its constituent parts.

The project has become more sophisticated across its four albums, now attaining not just a mystical quality but an almost mythical one. Amalgams of jazz and Indian classical music have existed for decades, but The Three Seas – by drawing on Bengali and other South Indian folk music – find themselves in a less cerebral place, and one less constrained by orthodoxies.

The album begins with a brief prelude, Into the Night, in which Deo Ashish Mothey sings of the fragility of life, accompanied primarily by the haunting strains of his own dotora (a two-string, banjo-like instrument). Having suggested there must be a less destructive way to go about living, it’s as if the rest of the album sets about doing exactly that.

The prelude slides into bassist Brendan Clark’s Murano, a piece that implicitly evokes journeying with its deep groove and Matt Keegan’s cruising saxophone riffs, which frame glistening improvisational flurries from the dotora. The more dramatic Bhalobasha Makorshar Jal is sung in a keening voice by Raju Das Baul, the Bengali lyric likening love to a spider’s web. The music, meanwhile, ensnares us in a delicate mesh of breathy saxophone, bass and percussion, later braced by Gaurab Chatterjee’s singularly airy deployment of a drum kit.

Chatterjee then takes centre stage singing the hit Bengali song Prithibi, composed by his father. This is the band at its most poppy, yet it can go there without losing the aura of mysticism and exoticism, aided by careful layering of the sounds (the album having been recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios). It’s juxtaposed with Khyentse, based on a tantric healing chant, sung by Mothey over a building, enveloping groove. Even greater contrasts come with Keegan’s surging Chhau, followed by Rongmohole (Palace of Pleasures), a didactic song about the evils of self-indulgence.

Keegan also composed the hypnotic Tone Shaman, his tenor answering Mothey’s chanted lyrics with a wondrous breadth of sound. Then his baritone takes the dancing refrain of The Doctrine, before the happy-hippy tribal Real World, which is catchy but less interesting than the following Lasha, a lilting piece drawing on a Nepalese tale of epic tragedy.

Much of the material was worthy of considerable expansion with more improvisation, but perhaps that happens when they perform live, which they’re doing in Australia during April and early May.

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