Tag: Music

Geeta in the shooting stills for Guru Dutt’s aborted Cinemascope film Gouri The her 50th death anniversary, it is a good time to recall Geeta Dutt’s prodigious talent which like a river, continues to flow on in our memories.

Sayandeb Chowdhury spends a day with maestro Nikita Koshkin. Calcutta, in more agreeable times, hosted global superstars and their work with abandon and discerning deliverance. From Marlon Brando to Loise Malle, from Marcel Marceau to Pete Seeger, from Pele to Maradona, from Che Guevara to Fidel Castro, this city has been the unlikely host of some the planet’s biggest names in arts, politics and sports. The city’s legendary enthusiasm, more than made up for its lack of cosmopolitan niceties.  But…

LPs for sale at the iconic footpath store near Calcutta’s Wellington crossing, 2010. Photo by author. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who while nurturing a deep distaste for everything Christian and worthy of appreciation in the Western world had reserved a keen ear for music, famously said: “Without music life would be a mistake.” Though it is not known, this author of A Case for Wagner must have heard his music in LPs. Technologically it’s unlikely because LPs came later than Nietzsche’s descent…

Still from Anjan Dutta’s Ranjana Ami ar Ashbona, 2011. Anjan Dutt’s new rock musical is low on cultural memory and high on imagined nostalgia, writes Sayandeb Chowdhury Can five ageing rockers, none of them stars but charismatic individuals, drifters and iconoclasts and dedicated to music in their real and reel life, make for successful Bengali cinema? Is the rock music scene in Calcutta that important to sustain a prolonged narrative about its many trails? Is the making of a female…

Once the Bengali bands made a splash with new albums and signature shows but now it’s all whispers with no new bands making any impact. Is this about the short shelf life endemic to bands globally or have Bangla bands lost their way? Mohiner Ghoraguli was the Frantz Kafka of Bengali rock scene — avant-garde and discovered to high critical acclaim only much after its death in 1981. Kafka’s literary executor Max Brod brought Kafka to the world. In case…