Brave New World at Blue Frog

You can love him or hate him, but damn you just can’t be indifferent to his music. It seems he played live after 14 years. Was it the stage block (a la writers’ block) that had been keeping him off stage? Or was it an intrinsic reticence on his part. A few times I asked him, he sounded rather defensive, “Aww I ain’t as talented as some of the guys who play here, I’m not actually a musician, I’m just a composer…”

In his own way, I think he was trying to tell me not to expect incendiary instrumental skills during his performance. I also feel he wasn’t too sure of the impact of the music on the Blue Frog audiences. He might even have been unsure of himself about how would he be able to pull on a live act. He must be feeling rusted, and nervous and apprehensive.

Thank God, Ashutosh Phatak did not pursue his Wharton MBA. And thank God for his dad who from the first row was egging him for an encore (“One for your dad?”). For, it must take special dads to be cool about opting for music instead of Whartons. I have a friend whose son – a maths grad, no less – plays in a band full time. This friend is special. SO I know what kind of dads inspire their sons, oh-so-subtly...

Ashu is a dreamer. And it reflects on his music. I don’t exactly understand what “psy-fi” (psychological fiction?) means. Sounds pretentious to me, but the music that Ashu had composed was anything but pretentious. Even a track titled Plastic Poetry had pretentiousness shorn off, loud and clear.

In fact, the music that night had all the ingredients that would captivate a 5,000 strong crowd. For the 350 odd present that night, it was indeed a brave new world that was transgressed that night. I don’t know if Ashu had soma – I’m sure he didn’t – but the operatic rendition of all inclusive genre of music that he had composed has to be listened to with scrutiny. If music needed to be added to Huxley, Ashu had got it pat. A composition would start with a blues flavour, progress into jazz, break into gospel, soul, funk, R&B, rhythm, shriek its way into metal and rock, and then come back to the soulful vocals. His compositions had them all, but what I loved was the way each merged with the other, seamlessly, effortlessly, liltingly and it was fuckin’ awesome!

Ashu’s music (not to be confused with Iron Maiden’s album, Brave New World – yes, that too is based on Huxley’s classic), particularly reminded me of Huxley and of what GBS wrote about Brave New World, “…A new bitterness, and a new bewilderment, ran through all social life, and was reflected in all literature and art. It was contemptuous, not only of old Capitalism, but of the old socialism. Brave New World is more of rebvolt against Utopia than against Victoria (as in Victorian self-righteousness)”

Alter the co-ordinates, add today’s social dimensions, set it against today’s context, and the 90 minute performance that night gains a significance that all musicians and patrons need to take note. Songs like Epiphany (confession: that’s the only name I remember now and Plastic Poetry, a name I didn’t like much) and the music that he has composed for all the tracks actually define to me not just the social and psychological angst of individuals, it throws open the political gauntlet too, in an individual idiom, of course.

The explanation of his music on the website reads, “Mumbai-born composer ASHUTOSH PHATAK’s music is the stuff of dreams. Opulent, lucid and at times unsettling, Ashu’s mystic soundscapes artfully weave stories of love and loss, of hope and fear: stories that are at once intensely personal and invitingly universal. His psy-fi rock operas are best listened to in their entirety, and offer an immersive sensory experience that immediately engulfs. Both his debut album ‘I’ and upcoming sophomore release ‘Epiphany’ are rooted in duality, and exist in fantastic worlds that are intimate, expansive and rich in their visual imagery. But listener beware: this is not music for the faint of heart, journeying as it does between the ethereal and the nightmarish.”

Discount the hype, delete the psychological mumbo-jumbo, just home in to the last line. It truly is not for the faint hearted or wimpy fence-sitters. This is a music that gets your adrenalin rushing, this is a music that will either prompt you to dig into your lover to draw blood or prompt you to snatch the batons from the pigs and break all the glasses in your vicinity. Certain tracks incite you to a never-ending foreplay while others made me feel like going back to boxing rink and pound each other’s flesh out. It made you scream, exult, cry, fight, in a truly cathartic way.

What was highly impressive was the musicians who came that night to accompany Ashu. Himself on keys and vocals, it was Vivian Pocha’s black mama’s voice, that added the soul, Sanjay Dwivecha’s guitar riffs and wails that permeated the genres, and most of all it was the drummer (I can never remember his name) who continued punching the adrenalin rush, inexorably, and mercilessly. I, however, missed some heavy metal guitaring in portions. There were times when Sanjay’s guitar plucks and wails needed to be complemented by some Hendrix-like electric guitar riffs and wah-wahs. In hindsight, its OK, because if they had a bit of heavier metal, who knows, the crowd could have stampeded or broken a few crockery.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I feel that maybe someone should make a rock opera kind of a movie based on Huxley’s Brave New World in the 21st century. Just film it on two characters, Bernard and Lenina and maybe John and Linda, posit it against the social indifference and Page 3 uniformity of today and you have a context. Put Ashu’s performance with live musicians on the stage and you have a recipe for an experiment worth trying.

If only I had the brains and creativity of Mahesh and his team…