Best of Baluji Shrivastav

The British-Indian composer Baluji Shrivastav is an outsider where Indian music is concerned. A multi-instrumentalist, he plays sitar as well as surbahar (bass sitar), dilruba, (a string instrument played with a bow), pakhavaj (the ancient barrel-shaped drum) as well as tabla. Shrivastav, who was blinded in childhood, is not a hereditary musician and could not be trained in the traditional way, in which a disciple is required to do numerous chores for the guru. Largely self-taught, he established the London-based Baluji Music Foundation in 2008, a charity devoted to encouraging people with disabilities to participate in music, leading to the setting up of The Inner Vision Orchestra. He received an OBE for services to music in 2016.

These tracks offer many musical flavours including the Arabic classic ‘Diggy Diggy Diggy ya Rababa’ (Play, Play, Play O Rabab) and the all-time favourite Afghani song ‘Chashm-e-Siah Dari’ (Your Black Eyes). The compositions are all equally intriguing, particularly the bluesy sounding ‘Journey to Sedna’, the Inuit goddess of the deep sea, while ‘Fruit’, by Shrivastav’s wife Linda Shanovitch, combines Latin American rhythms with Indian instruments, and is delightfully reminiscent of klezmer.

But Indian classical music remains at the core of this compilation and ‘Raga Dhani’ introduces us to the many nuances of the dilruba and perfectly evokes the pre-dusk mood of this raga: it’s a track you’ll want to play over and over again. The album concludes with a folk-style tune in ‘Raga Bhairavi’ for which Shrivastav plays sitar, surbahar and dilruba multi-tracked to create a jugalbandi (duet) effect.