Saagara is the project of Polish, Warsaw-based electronics player-producer (and in a previous incarnation a free jazz clarinetist who has collaborated with Joe McPhee and Ken Vandermark) Wacław Zimpel with Indian masters of the Carnatic musical tradition of southern India – percussionists Giridhar Udupa (ghatam), Aggu Baba (khanjira) and K Raja (thavil) and violinist Mysore N. Karthik. 3 is the third album of this project, following the self-titled debut album and 2 (MultiKulti, 2015 and Instant Classic, 2017). Saagra offers an uplifting juxtaposition of traditional Indian rhythms and pulsating, futurist, synth-based repetitive patterns.
Zimpel, who describes himself now as a producer rather than an instrumentalist, began the Saagara project during his visit to India in 2012, thinking of blending Western melodic-rhythmic concepts with Carnatic ones, and taking John McLaughlin’s Shakti as a seminal influence. But Zimpel wanted to make Saagara different from the common, exotic West meets East projects. He colored this project with his long interest in minimalism, tinged with acidic electronics and acoustic and processed clarinet sounds, shaping and playing with the edgy grooves and sounds of Carnatic music’s most prominent percussive instruments and Karthik’s violin parts.
3 suggests Saagara’s musical evolution toward the dance floors with its focus on layered, processed electronic textures and grooves and studio, and software-based manipulation of the traditional instruments, or deconstructing or reducing these instruments’ tracks altogether. But despite the intricate studio work, 3 sounds like a vivid, tangible sonic organism, that blurs the distinction between ancient rituals and modern-day dance moves, the acoustic and the electronics, tradition and the future. It is a folky-cosmic trance music that binds «Earth, Water and The Holy Groove as the last piece is titled, or, if you wish for a familiar reference, add generous doses of acid to ECM’s classic album from 1983, Jyothi, of Charlie Mariano & The Karnataka College Of Percussion* Featuring R. A. Ramamani.
Eyal Hareuveni
Wacław Zimpel (electronics, calrinet), Giridhar Udupa (ghatam), Aggu Baba (khanjira), K Raja (thavil), Mysore N. Karthik (violin), Udupa (konnakol)
