Charanjit Singh is a fascinating character. So fascinating, I don’t even know where to start. The Indian musician and composer led a wedding band, produced instrumental elevator music, played guitar, bass, keyboards, and synthesizers on the soundtracks of literally hundreds of Bollywood movies, and once held off a pack of hungry wolves with nothing but a VCR copy of O.P. Goyle’s 1973 Hindi-language film Bandhe Hath.
Okay, so I made up that last part. But Singh is credited with introducing synthesizers into Bollywood film scores, making him a pioneer. But what makes him even more of an innovator is his 1982 debut LP Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat, which didn’t sell (despite its supercool cover) but was rediscovered years later, and (thanks in particular to his pioneering use of the Roland TB-303) led to his being called “the Father of Acid House.”
It’s an odd fusion, raga and disco, and if 1982 seems like rather a late date to be putting out ANY disco LP, it wasn’t in India, where Pakistani pop singer Nazia Hassan and Indian producer Biddu in particular set the spark to a thriving electronic disco scene—Saturday Night Fever set to a Bollywood beat. But it was Singh who explored the possibilities of combining raga and disco music, with a dollop of Bollywood filmi music thrown in.
Singh had a kind of mystico-electronica experience when he discovered synthesizers, and specifically the Roland Corporation’s Jupiter-8 (“an 8-voice polyphonic analog synthesizer,” whatever that means), the TR-808 drum machine, and the TB-303 bass synthesizer. It was like he discovered LSD, but you had to plug it in.
Singh purchased the synthesizers in Singapore, then retreated to a basement in Mumbai and set about studying them the way an English Lit graduate student might John Ford’s 1626 play ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. What he basically ended up doing was setting one thousand-and-a-half-year-old sliding raga scales to a four-on-the-floor disco beat. Here’s Singh: “There was lots of disco music in films back in 1982. So I thought why not do something different using disco music only. I got an idea to play all the Indian ragas and give the beat a disco beat—and turn off the tabla. And I did it. And it turned out good.”
The album’s title would seem to be self-explanatory, but it is a bit misleading, at least to my ears. I don’t hear much of what I think about when I hear the word raga, and the disco sure ain’t KC and the Sunshine Band. In many cases, the raga touches SEEM purely ornamental—they’re there to add Indian flavoring—and this isn’t music you can do the bump to. Which isn’t to say these songs lack a beat—the rhythms pulsate, and the beat is fast. Really fast.
What I hear when I listen to Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat is Kraftwerk gone full Bollywood. Forget the Autobahn and the Trans-Europe Express. Singh treats you to an antique-futuristic proto-Acid House ride on the Orient Express, and Ravi Shankar is definitely not on board. It’s the ghost of Indian traditional music you hear on the album—the spirit, not the flesh, although perhaps I’m giving Singh short shrift—one critic wrote that Singh’s “303 ends up being perfect for the slithery glissandos in Indian music, the sliding between one note and the next.”
Most of the songs feature a very short raga-like opening, then the beat goes on and on while Singh plays like a madman over it, like Herbie Hancock gone full Hare Krishna. These songs would make a fantastic film score for a thriller set in Calcutta.
Me, I see a kind of Bhakti action film starring a modern incarnation of Hanuman, the Indian monkey god who acts as Lord Rama’s consigliere and muscle. He’s a wise, loving, and compassionate badass with a set of specialized skills to say nothing of an array of superpowers. And have I mentioned he’s the general of a no-shit monkey ARMY? The screenplay practically writes itself!
Disco with electronic sequencing may have been avant-garde, but the ragas are classical. “Raga Malkauns,” for example, is one of the oldest in Indian classical music. You certainly don’t need to know the traditional takes, but you do need to know that Singh isn’t working from nothing.
What you also need to know is that I’ve listened to these songs plenty of times, and I still can’t put names to them when I hear them. “Raga Lalit” sounds much like “Raga Bhairav” to me, and the only way I can tell them apart is because the latter opens with a very cool vocorder featuring a synthesized voice repeating the five-syllable mantra “Om Namah Shivaya,” which means “O salutations to the auspicious one!” or “Adoration to Lord Shiva.”
But when I say I can’t tell them apart, it DOESN’T MATTER. What matters is they flow seamlessly, in a very groovy and retro-futuristic manner, one into the next, like the Ganges flowing to the sea, and not even the series of explosions that open “Raga Megh Malhar” is enough to stop you for long.
And about those explosions (which are followed by some synthesized bird noise). They puzzled me a bit until I learned that the Megh Malhar is a classical raga reputed to have the power to bring rain, so I suppose those explosions are thunder. And I plan to crank it up the next time I’m in the mood for a good downpour.
There’s a version of the album out there with three additional tracks by other musicians. It touts itself as a compilation, and I can’t say I recommend it, although the famed Bollywood songwriting duo Shankar-Jaikishan’s jazzy, old-school R&B-flavored take on “Raga Kalawati” is a real revelation and well worth checking out. It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard, and having heard it, I checked out more music by the duo, who are considered amongst the best composers of the Hindi film industry.
I was sent on a wild goose chase until I discovered the 1968 “swing” album Jazz Raga Style, which also features the Pakistani sitarist Rais Khan. Most of it isn’t as good as “Raga Kalawati.” But it definitely makes for interesting listening. It’s not every day you hear jazz sitar.
A travel tip: if you’re thinking of traveling to India, and particularly to the city of Vrindavan, a pilgrimage site for Bhakti devotees of Lord Krishna. Don’t wear glasses. Vrindavan’s thieving monkey population will snatch the glasses right off your face and then hold them for ransom. I am not making this up. The monkeys of Vrindavan, in conjunction with the street kids of Vrindavan, have worked out the perfect scam. A monkey will jump on your shoulder, snatch your glasses, and then flee to safety, leaving you to pay a street kid to offer up the ransom—a pair of juice boxes, quite often. One box won’t do it. And after you’ve paid for the juice boxes, you have to pay the kid, who serves as a middleman or broker.
I bring this up because what Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat does is steal your ears and hold them hostage. Except there’s no monkey, no street kid, no ransom, no getting your ears back. Fortunately, you won’t want them back. Because Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat is cool as shit.
Hare Krishna!
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