Sandeep Das & the HUM Ensemble: Delhi to Damascus
In A Circle Records

With Delhi to Damascus, tabla virtuoso Sandeep Das puts his ideas about global community and shared humanity into practice with a group whose members hail from India and Syria. Whatever divisions there might be between the countries fall entirely to the wayside when the four musicians play. The album is the debut recording of the HUM Ensemble, which takes its name from 'Harmony and Universality through Music,' an organization Das founded a decade ago to promote global understanding through music. Though Delhi to Damascus is his first self-produced release, the Grammy Award-winning Das (Sing Me Home, a collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, was recognized in 2017 as the ‘Best World Music Album') has over thirty albums to his credit in a career spanning three decades.

He surrounds himself with impressive partners on the hour-long recording, Syrian Kinan Adnawi on oud and from India sitarist Rajib Karmakar and sarangi player and vocalist Suhail Yusuf Khan. The eight pieces, a mix of originals by Karmakar and Adnawi and traditionals, naturally draw from the musicians' backgrounds, with seamless blends of lyrical folk melodies, traditional Indian ragas, and Arabic maqams the stirring result. Karmakar and Khan engage in a conversational to-and-fro that's never less than captivating, while the playing of Das and Adnawi proves as compelling.

Das's Indian Classical-meets-Middle Eastern fusion begins with Karmakar's “Parvaaz-e Noor: Flight of Light,” Adnawi's rapid runs initiating the piece dramatically and laying the ground for Das's first virtuosic expression. Karmakar and Khan complete the picture with a dazzling unison statement after which the two trade solos like some glorious modern-day fusion incarnation. Consistent with its title, “Virah: The Longing” conveys yearning, from the moving sarangi lament with which it begins and on through the oud expressions that follow. Deepening the emotional effect is Khan's passionate vocal, an element that humanizes the material all the more.

Intended as a tribute to the cultural growth that resulted from trade along the Silk Road, Adnawi's title track encourages the instruments to be heard as the voices of merchants pitching goods and bartering. After Khan's unaccompanied sarangi asserts itself, a dialogue ensues between him and Adnawi, after which Karmakar makes his own unaccompanied pitch. Eventually all join in, the quartet suggesting by its joyful expressions the excitement of merchants trading. If “Come Hither, My Love” exudes a playful quality, it might have to do with the fact that it's rooted in a traditional song about a woman romantically teasing her beloved, their affectionate interactions reflected in the interplay between sitar and sarangi and the piece's singing melodies.

Showcasing a dazzling duet by Karmakar and Das, the traditional Indian raga “Shiva-Shakti” casts the dance between two divine forces into musical form, with masculine (Shiva) and feminine (Shakti) energies symbolized by tabla and sitar, respectively. In like manner, “Aafreen” pairs sarangi and tabla for nine intoxicating minutes, the title possessing many meanings, among them “moonlight” in Persian and “beautiful” in Turkish. Personifying the Vedic goddess of dawn, the closing “Usha” is naturally meditative in mood, though it, like much else on the album, swells in energy as it advances to a crescendo.

October 2020