Aarambh

Toronto-based singer Abby V (Abby Venkatachalam) teams up with producer-composer and three-time Grammy winner Ricky Kej for Aarambh, which means ‘beginning’ in Sanskrit. The album, released by the UK-based media platform Sufiscore, which has garnered a huge following given its agenda of collaborative music projects around the world, has a set of new compositions and arrangements in a variety of voices featuring traditional light-classical songs most of which are in an old dialect of Hindi. At its core the album is Indian classical but the instrumentation is overtly modern, fusing classical vocals with strings, electronica and beat-based music.

Abby V’s singing on Aarambh is both pleasing and immensely competent and all the other voices, including such legendary stalwarts as K S Chithra and the very popular Pratibha Singh and others, have their own unique tones and bring a well-executed charm and freshness to these old favourites. Speaking of which, the album’s final track is perhaps the only one that doesn’t quite fit the bill. A reworking of The Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’, it suffers from some heavy-handed over-production, although the sitar, played by Asad Khan, works well. It’s a matter of taste but perhaps for those of us who grew up on The Beatles and associate that classic with a rather bare wistfulness, its treatment on Aarambh could prove quite unsettling.