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"Chaudhuri's 'non-fusion' music creates a striking metaphor for the urban sensibility."
Ivan Hewett, Daily Telegraph, London

"Sublime music...' Wall Street Journal, Asia

"Chaudhuri is a wonderful singer-- without any qualification such as 'considering his distinction as a writer.' There is a sense of calm, a simplicity, an inwardness to his singing which deeply appeals to me."
Vikram Seth, author

“I think Chaudhuri’s CD (and I have listened to it several times by now) is a landmark project in the inter-musical landscape between Western and Indian music. It stems from a very personal between-the-worlds and is attractive because the necessary negotiations within the musical sphere reach out to so many other levels of understanding music: social, biographical, technological. But most of all it is a kind of music that has clearly defined roots: not in one tradition or the other but in a very personal terrain of the globalized soul. Very often, music critics demand "authenticity" and "honesty" from music - a demand bound to produce a phoney parochial "authenticity": for no musician today lives unaware of all the other musical possibilities around them. Chaudhuri’s music is "authentic" in another, more important sense: it does not construct an ideal place, but shows us where it came from and what is lost - but also what can be gained in admitting strangeness into your own tradition.”
Sandeep Bhagwati, well-known Indo-German composer of Western art music, and professor at the Dept of Music, Concordia University, Canada

 

"Universally appealing... both the melodies and the lyrics are slyly parodic."
Naresh Fernandes, Time Out Bombay

“I’ve been waiting for this music for 37 years… These songs are brilliant.’
Usha Uthup, the best-known singer of the Western popular song in India

“Sparkling yet thoughtful… melding Indian classical with rock. Possibly for the first time ever, a Hindustani vocalist uses the blues as bandish, on the Gershwin classic Summertime. The result is divine.”
Ananda Lal, Professor of English, Jadavpur University, jazz, popular music, and theatre critic

“The work has intellect but is not intended to be ‘clever’. That means it references many ideas and streams of thought all at the same time, and I like this layering of ideas. And these ideas arise in some sort of organic way, as in first Chaudhuri’s own organism and its memory. The fact is that Chaudhuri is exploring emotional ranges within the tunes, and that requires control: as in what to throw out or what to focus in on. And I never once got the sense that Chaudhuri is trying to be clever or that it’s about navel gazing: there is a fun element to it which is a sufficient deterrent to either trying too hard to connect the dots between two traditions or taking oneself too seriously.”
Madhav Chari, India’s leading jazz pianist

“I'm very struck by the sheer range of Chaudhuri’s musical affinities and internalizations. The kind of melding that is at work here cannot happen arbitrarily. There's a logic to it, a very elusive and beautiful intersection of different musical traditions. Chaudhuri has made me listen to Summertime in an altogether different register, and in his marvellously precise, yet quirky, lyrics, I found myself remembering Simon and Garfunkel and all those wonderful musicians that were part of my growing up in Calcutta… Listening to Chaudhuri’s particular blend of different musics, which is non-fusion, I was alerted to the enormously creative possibilities of one music catalyzing the creative possibilities of another. How beautiful that his voice should be able to cross so many intimate territories, and with such fine performative poise.”
Rustom Bharucha, one of India’s leading cultural commentators