From sitar to symphony orchestra

COMPOSER and DJ Nitin Sawhney headlines a new festival of South Asian culture.

World music star Nitin Sawnhey will be headlining the Parramasala festival in Sydney. Picture: Amos Aikman

COMPOSER and DJ Nitin Sawhney headlines a new festival of South Asian culture.

EACH year at Christmas, Anglo-Indian musician and composer Nitin Sawhney receives a case of beer from the private brewery of Paul McCartney. The two have been friends since the former Beatle fell in love with Sawhney's music 15 years ago.

"He is an absolute gem of a bloke," Sawhney says. "When he first came around to the little bedsit I was living in at the time, he was just so humble about hanging out there for a few hours. He told me that he used to live in a place just like it."

The friendship started when McCartney began turning up regularly at Sawhney's gigs, and it led to McCartney co-writing and singing on the song My Soul, on Sawhney's acclaimed 2008 album London Underground.

One of the busiest musicians and composers working today, Sawhney has a CV that reads like the accomplishments of several people. The 46-year-old has recorded eight studio albums, has written scores for more than 40 film and television productions, and has collaborated with Sting, Cirque du Soleil, Shakira, Imogen Heap and Anoushka Shankar, as well as a stream of lesser-known acts.

"It's always fantastic when you collaborate with people who aren't so well known, who then go on to become very well known," he says, citing the emergence of Taio Cruz. "He's one of the top artists in the world now, but he worked with me when he was just 19."

The composer has also scored video games such as the Sony PlayStation favourite Heavenly Sword and the recently completed Enslaved. And he loves to squeeze in a DJ set at a club or two when he can. As The Guardian has pointed out: "It would be easier to jot down what this man can't do than what he can."

Amid complaints of profound jetlag and a temporarily bloodshot and swollen eye that makes him look a little like something from The Terminator, Sawhney manages a 2 1/2-hour kickboxing and gym session before our morning meeting. When he arrives, he radiates calm, coupled with the energy and grace of a panther.

In Sydney to headline Parramasala, the first Australian Festival of South Asian Arts, Sawhney quietly recounts the steps that have led him to the prominence and respect he enjoys today.

"I took up flamenco guitar when I was eight years old and also did the grades in piano as a youngster, eventually playing in youth orchestras," he says.

Attracted to the music of his Indian heritage, Sawhney took up tabla and sitar. But it was never going to be enough. "I played in funk bands, rock bands, punk bands, and in jazz quartets as a jazz pianist. I just grew up with music, listening to Brazilian, Cuban, to so many different flavours of music."

Though he is quietly proud of his diverse musical accomplishments, and capable of laser-like focus on any of them, Sawhney always has several balls in the air at any one time. For example, he has just written a script, as well as the music, for his next studio album, The Last Days of Meaning. Sawhney sent the script to veteran English actor John Hurt who, he says, will play lead character Donald Meaning.

Sawhney says the idea came to him during the recent British general election. "As always, when there's a downturn in the economy, they were all blaming immigrants," he says.

"I was just getting really fed up listening to this shit, so I decided to write something metaphorical to express how I felt without being too preachy about it."

Sawhney came up with the idea of an embittered, angry old man who wants nothing to do with the outside world, even though it keeps knocking on his door. His only comfort is a cassette player his ex-wife has sent him which has music on it: the music of the album. "You can hear him mumbling and grumbling, and blaming everyone, but in the end the music changes him, and he softens. I guess it's a bit like Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett. It's based on the same kind of person."

Another ball in the air is Einstein/Tagore, a play he is writing for Sadler's Wells Theatre about the conversations between Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore in the 1930s. "Andy Serkis [Gollum in Lord of the Rings] has kindly agreed to play Einstein," Sawhney says. "I'm directing as well, so I get to direct Andy in my directorial debut."

While he was working on the labour-intensive score for the video game Enslaved, Sawhney was concurrently creating the soundtrack for the BBC's The Human Planet. Of the latter, he says: "That was full-on orchestral scoring: mental. I had to write and score 50 minutes of music for it a week," he says, for the first time revealing that his energy is not superhuman.

Sawhney's commitments to Parramasala should be a walk in the park. On Saturday, with a full orchestra and many Indian musicians, he will present a new score he has written for the 1929 silent film Throw of the Dice. While many composers collaborate on film scores, Sawhney prefers to do his own. "I like to orchestrate and work on things sonically," he says. "The feeling comes from the instrumentation you use and the way you use it." But he won't be conducting the performance: "I'll be playing piano and celeste. I prefer to be part of the orchestra."

On Sunday, Sawhney presents a DJ set, with a mix of flamenco, Indian classical music, Brazilian samba and hip hop.

While Parramasala sounds like something deliciously edible, it is a feast of a different kind: a four-day festival of contemporary performance artists who embrace the traditions of the South Asian region.

Artistic director Philip Rolfe says he expects it to attract people from different backgrounds. Masala means mixture and Parra has long been the colloquial term for the bustling city 23km west of Sydney's city centre.

Western Sydney has a large South Asian community - mainly Indian and Pakistani - but Rolfe says he hopes the appeal of the festival will be broad.

"What we envisage is an event that attracts a whole string of people from very different backgrounds," Rolfe says. "The whole Asian scene has been something of great interest to me for more than 20 years. I'm certainly not a specialist, but the networks and connections I have in Asia are very strong."

Parramasala was also born of a desire to bring something completely different to greater Sydney. "If you look at what's on offer in the mainstream in the established companies in Sydney, there's a pretty strong Eurocentric positioning," Rolfe says.

"Here is a chance to tap into whole new markets. We're not really thinking just of work that comes from those mainlands, but how those cultures [influence] artists worldwide."

Rolfe says that although South Asian culture is the name of the game, the focus is on contemporary, rather than traditional, expressions of it. "It's also about how artists all over the world collaborate. That's a really vital ingredient in making absolutely riveting, fantastic art," he says.

A good example is Tap Kathak, an improvised performance by India's Pandit Chitresh Das, a master of the classical northern Indian dance style Kathak and American tap-dancer Jason Samuel Smith.

Parramasala opens today and runs until Monday.

Nitin Sawhney will also appear at Womadelaide in March.