Joys Abound

Perhaps the most aptly named debut album of recent times, Joys Abound certainly lives up to its name. Anandi Bhattacharya's dazzling vocals are quite amazing for a 22-year-old, given that Indian classical singers are only generally taken seriously after the age of about 40. She is accompanied by a star line-up of instruments and musicians, including her father, Debashish Bhattacharya, on the chaturangui (his adaptation of slide guitar for Indian classical music). Several different lutes – oud, dotara, rabab, mandolin and charango – as well as an array of percussion instruments enhance Anandi's richly rounded timbre and tone. The listener is drawn in right from the first track, ‘Jai Ganesh’, which is a bubbling, exuberant invocation to the Hindu god Ganesh. Her ability to convey a variety of emotions is impressively evocative, from the gentler ‘Amaro Porano Jaha Chay (What my Heart Desires)’ to the livelier and intriguingly named ‘A Pluviophile's Dance (Sawani)’, a song to celebrate the monsoon, Rajasthani-style that causes you to almost feel the cooling spray of rain. But her vocal dexterity on ‘Maya's Dream’, a track played in ‘Raga Kalavati’, is astonishing, to say the least. Joys Abound successfully encapsulates the traditional and classical, and yet at the same time manages to be innovative and outward-looking, which is sure to appeal to fans as well as newcomers to Indian music.