Hong Kong musicians fuse jazz, Bollywood and Indian classical tunes

There's nothing new about the incorporation of elements of Indian music into jazz. "Indo-jazz fusion" has been around since the 1970s, while John Coltrane was studying ragas with Ravi Shankar in the '60s well before George Harrison bought his first sitar.

However, despite the substantial Indian community in Hong Kong, few if any experiments mingling Indian musical traditions with jazz have been attempted here. Jayang Jhaveri, a local Indian singer and student of Indian classical music under the celebrated Hindustani vocalist and diva Kishori Amonkar, is a jazz fan who wants to put that right.

A couple of years ago, he tentatively began discussing his ideas for "Indian singers jamming with Hong Kong jazz musicians" with pianist Jason Cheng and guitarist Skip Moy, who put him in touch with pianist Joao Mascarenhas. The Brazilian liked the idea and agreed to write some jazz arrangements of Indian music and act as musical director for a show, entitled "In Harmony", which will be presented on Thursday at the Academy Community Hall at Baptist University in Kowloon Tong.

"Essentially the show fuses jazz and Latin with Bollywood and Indian classical/folk styles - with segues in and out of Hindi film songs, classical ragas and Latin standards," says Jhaveri.

"Our own Eugene Pao is featured as special guest artist, along with Falu, who's a multifaceted vocalist of Indian origin from New York whose repertoire spans Indian classical, folk, jazz and hip hop.

"We have kept the lyrics and the melodies of the originals intact, but we have rearranged a lot of the songs for jazz. Each raga has its own distinct feeling or emotion associated with it, so that is one of the things we are presenting. Then we have folk music from four provinces in India, and some Bollywood classics that easily lend themselves to jazz interpretations," says Jhaveri.