The first time cellist Matthew Barley met and sat down with renowned Indian classical musician, Amjad Ali Khan, about four years ago now, the pair ended up playing together for eight hours straight. They even composed a new piece of music that day, Barley recalls.
The collaboration came about when Khan approached organisers of one of his Royal Festival Hall concerts with a request to work with a western string player. Promoters were somehow lead to Barley’s door. ‘But the question,’ says Barley, ‘was how to get together with Amjad to have a bit of a jam to see how it was going to work out.’
Khan, who is based in Delhi, and London-based Barley, compared dates over a 12-month period and found they would never be in the same place at the same time, so on the way back to England from performing in Australia Barley stopped over in India.
The result was an instant connection – both musically and philosophically. The pair – who will be performing at the WOMAD Rivermead Festival in Reading this weekend – performed for the first time together in 2000 to a sell-out audience at the Royal Festival Hall.
‘I just threw myself into it,’ Barley enthuses. ‘Because it [Indian classical music] is an improvising tradition there is a lot of space to do your own thing.’ The idea was never to study to become an Indian classical musician, Barley emphasises, but to find a new language. ‘The idea is, that I do my own thing, I’m very inspired by Indian music and I’m learning a lot about it.’
For Barley, it is the flexibility of this improvisation that he loves. And it doesn’t always just happen off-stage when preparing new works for a concert.
‘When we played in Paris a few weeks ago we went right off on a tangent, somewhere we’ve never gone before,’ he exclaims. The duo didn’t even get past the introduction to a piece, he recalls. The first section of a composition they began playing simply evolved into a piece all of its own.
Although Barley, over the past 20 years, has played with the likes of the London Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic, the Philharmonia and the London Sinfonietta, his career has also spanned cross-disciplinary projects, composition and pioneering community programmes. While he is content playing Shostakovich, Prokofiev or a Bach suite, he has also commissioned new works and premiered pieces by John Woolrich, Dimitri Smirnov, Carl Vine, Peter Wiegold and Fraser Trainer. The latter also happens to be one-fifth of the performance and education group Barley founded in 1997, Between the Notes. (And, Barley can’t help adding, in his opinion, Trainer is one of the most exciting new composers around today.)
Khan on the other hand, is renowned as the maestro of the sarod, an Indian classical instrument, which he has played in major concert halls around the world. Khan is actually the direct descendent of the 17th century Afghani horse-trader, Mohammed Hashmi Khan, who settled in India and began the Bangash dynasty of musicians.
Despite their different backgrounds, Barley has found a common ground with Khan that extends beyond a musical connection.
‘Amjad is a very interesting man. I just went over there [to India] recently, just to study and practice. We had an amazing week, spent a lot of time just discussing things, we have a very similar view of the world. He’s a very gentle, tolerant man.’
Barley points out that Khan is a Muslim married to a Hindu, and doesn’t believe in converting people to other religions, but rather keeping one’s own beliefs whilst respecting others’. Given the current political climate, Barley wonders if audiences looked on the partnership as a refreshing and peaceful one.
‘I don’t know whether this is fanciful or not,’ he begins, ‘but I was speaking with some of the Paris organisers after the event [a few weeks ago]. We were saying, it probably means a lot to people, with what is happening prolifically around the world, [that] you’ve got a young English guy, and an Indian Muslim musician, getting together with a really free, open, respectful place between them, doing their thing.’
Although Barley may be one of, if not the only, musician from a British classical background performing at the Reading WOMAD – the festival founded 21 years ago by Peter Gabriel, Thomas Brooman and Bob Hooton – the line-up features a number of artists who experiment with fusing a concoction of different musical influences. Nitin Sawhney, for example, draws on his Asian roots but mixes in R&B, jazzy grooves and in his latest album, Human, vocal recordings of speeches by Martin Luther King and Enoch Powell. Electronic outfit 1 Giant Leap, which is former Take That producer Duncan Bridgeman and Jamie Catto of Faithless, count the likes of Neneh Cherry, Robbie Williams, Brian Eno, Dennis Hopper, Baaba Maal, Tim Robbins and REM’s Michael Stipe among their vocal collaborators.
While to some, the convergence of musical styles – whether from the West, the East, or both – may seem like a relatively new phenomenon, for Barley it mirrors musical history – especially classical music history.
‘I often see so-called fusion projects really disparaged by the press,’ Barley notes, ‘and it gets me really anoyed – because there is nothing new about fusion, it’s what musicians have been doing for centuries. That’s why classical music moved out of Gregorian chants – because people started fusing it with other things. There isn’t really any pure music around.’
The WOMAD Festival Rivermead, Reading, takes place July 25-27. For further details visit www.womad.org/reading. Ticket Line: 0118 939 0930
