The Taal Tantra Experience: Reviews 1)

THE TAAL TANTRA EXPERIENCE: REVIEWS 1) Folkworld CD Reviews, Folk World Issue 43 11/2010 The Taal Tantra Experience "Sixth Sense" Label: Ozella music; 027; 2010 The Taal tantra experience is a German-Indian band that mixes the Indian traditional music with Western styles, jazz and modern sounds. The album has ten new compositions mixing the best of both worlds. Strong craftsmanship and a good producer makes this a nice, accessible album for a wide audience. Of course there are dozens of other groups who mix Indian roots with modern music, jazz, rock and so on. But this Taal Tantra Experience is doing a great job with exciting combinations in a beautiful atmosphere of sounds. www.ozellamusic.com Eelco Schilder 2) Soulseduction.com sixth sense - the taal tantra experience (CD) [listen now] release date: 1/10/2010 - available to download Transcendental German-Indian Sound Discourse While economists and social researchers argue about the pros and cons of globalization in the wake of the worldwide financial crisis, in music, the exchange and collaborations among the most diverse world music sounds and rhythms continue to flower in the most colorful ways. A current example of one such successful cooperation of different music cultures is the Taal Tantra Experience, which started up in 2001 in the German capital when a group of Berlin jazz musicians first met tabla virtuoso Tanmoy Bose. With Tanmoy Bose, who is touring the world with the greats of classical Indian music Ravi Shankar, Anoushka Shankar, Amjad Ali Khan and who participated on two Grammy winning recordings „Concert for George“ (Eric Clapton) and „Full Circle“, the project really got going, first in Berlin and then on the Indian subcontinent. Tanmoy Bose, who was impressed by the skills and musical curiosity of the four Berlin jazz musicians, invited them to take part in an Indian concert tour in the spring of 2003, which ended up in founding the The Taal Tantra Experience. The band, consisting of percussionist Andreas Weiser (Shank, Xiame, Degas/Weiser „Heimat“), guitarist Kai Brückner (Lisa Bassenge, Jocelyn B. Smith), bassist Max Hughes (Tino Gonzales, Kenny Martin), saxofonist/flutist Tilman Dehnhard (Nils Wülker, Sam Rivers) and Tanmoy Bose, produced their first CD in the same year, which however, was only released in India. Taal Tantra means roughly „Meditation on Rhythm". Influenced by the meditative power of ragas and their scale-oriented melody phrasing, and the complex rhythms of the Indian taals, the ten tracks on the new album „Sixth Sense“ produced by Andreas Weiser exude nothing less than hypnotic sensuality. Interacting with western jazz harmonics and sound and ambient-based production philosophy, a trans-continental sound emerged in which each element of style harmonizes equally with the others. Recorded in a production process lasting about two years in Berlin and Calcutta, the quintett sees its current work as a permanently developing experiment of cultural west-east collaboration. A collaboration which feeds on musical contrasts and always leads to new, trendsetting results in the end. An enthralling and extremely audiolicious process. The energetic and energy-laden songs from the Taal Tantra Experience rev up both body and mind. The colorful sonority is amplified by Indian slide guitarist Battacharia (Shakti) and Bengalese "Baul" singer Basu Deb, who lend the European coating of 'Sixth Sense' an additional traditional Indian note. by soulseduction posted: 31 Aug 2010 3) The-borderland.co.uk 13/10/10 The Taal Tantra Experience - Sixth Sense (OZ 027 CD) The Taal Tantra Experience - Sixth SenseTaking two years to produce, this collaboration of German and Indian musicians is well worth the wait. An exhilarating mix of East meets West, Sixth Sense is one of those albums where the cross-fertilisation of cultures works very well indeed. I have always been a bit of a 'world' music fan and this collection of mostly upbeat tracks certainly hits the spot for me. Led by renowned Indian musician Tanmoy Bose on tablas and vocals - he was the catalyst for this project - there are up to sixteen musicians playing together on this music. It is a rich mix of Indian percussion and traditional instruments and vocals to which are added electric guitars, bass, saxes, flutes and trumpets - provided by the German element. I think one of the best examples of this cross-cultural synergy is the twelve minute long It's Been A Long Way - it continuously weaves the traditional Indian elements with more ambient sections, street recordings, and jazz vibes. It really is the album's showpiece. But that doesn't reduce the rest of the album, there simply is not a bad track on this album. You can smell the rich spices in the market, hear the chaos of the traffic systems, and feel the overwhelming crush of the subcontinent's huge population. This is a Thomas Cooke package tour to the country from the safety of your armchair. The remaining tracks are: Khandem, Bhairabi, What We Need, Between The Worlds, Rikshaws On Rash Bihari, Trip To Kolkata, The Cobra, Puri and Howra Bridge. There are really far too many musicians to list here but I can say that Tanmoy Bose is more than matched by the assorted Indian and German musicians, and their commitment is tangible throughout this album. I loved Sixth Sense and hope the Taal Tantra Experience will record again, but please don't let it take two years next time... Highly recommended and most definitely one of my albums of 2010 [and any other year, come to that]. 4) tokafi Taal Tantra Experience: Sixth Sense flag September 29th 2010, by Tobias Fischer An everyday reality: Blissful Indian exultations and jazz stillness. article image Despite inspiring a wealth of classic albums over the past few decades, cross-over has always had its fierce critics. Bill Dixon, never a man to shy away from strong opinions, was quick to denounce what he considered a movement towards creative dilution: „That's something one shouldn't do at all. You can't combine anything, really. You can't just create a new language from French, Spanish, Italian, German and Russian. What you can do is to allow yourself to be influenced by these different languages to be able to express yourself more clearly in your own mother tongue.“ Tell that to the members of the Taal Tantra Experience. An Indo- German cultural combustion engine sparked and formed by Tabla-master Tanmoy Bose's spontaneous decision to check out Berlin's scene for Jazz and improvisation on the spur of the moment, the formation are juxtaposing the West with the East, the spiritual with the physical, the immediate with the carefully meditated and the erruptively rhythmical with the sensually harmonic. On their second full-length, „Sixth Sense“, the five-piece, frequently extended into a more sizable ensemble through the inclusion of a plethora of guest musicians, even more importantly manage to make the result sound entirely seamless and of one piece: After opening tune „Khandam“ has gotten off to a blistering start on the strength of polyrhthmic scat-vocals, Bosey's invigorating jaw harp and a suspenseful groove, Tilmann Dehnhard lays out the main motive, a long and winding, constantly breaking and accelerating entity stretching out over several bars and culminating in a Kletzmer-affiliated sidetheme, which paves the ground for a string of solos, each formulated in a distinctly personal idiom of its own and yet without creating harsh edges or crass contrasts. If there is a single, fundamental philosophy to the record as a whole – which actually seems highly unlikely considering the multitude of moods, styles and modes on display here – it must surely be that underneath regional garments and local dialects, there is a shared plateau on which the exchange of ideas, thoughts and emotions can take place on an intuitive and wordless level. The closest Taal Tantra have come to realising this vision is the progressive sonic architecture of „It's been a long way“, an organically stretched-out suite divided into three distinct and separate parts, which nonetheless add up to a cohesive whole. Over the course of its immersive twelve-and-a-half-minutes, this equally explorative, ambitious and immediate work runs the gamut from the Blues and Sound Art to Pop and hypnotic Electronica and back again, incorporating field recordings and a colorful instrumentation of Tablas and Sanfona alongside Percussion, Bass and Guitar. It also sees the musicians playing with concepts of space: While the opening section, in which Kai Brückner's guitar navigates through a maze of atmospheric chords, can be considered representative of the intimate and film-noir mood of a club gig, the trippy middle movement, driven by insistently funky rhythmics and cosmic vocals, appears to be floating through the air far away from earthly limitations. Its form, marked by both fluent and abrupt changes of tempo, ambiance and accents, neither dogmatically adheres to the impro-tradition nor the parameters set by Indian music, creating a new and idiosyncratic framework for expression instead. While the remaining material is of a decisively more concise and familiar quality, the album as a whole seems to have been conceptualised as a singular journey, with tracks corresponding to each other like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. While the music, on an individual compositional level, leans towards the integrative rather than the confrontational, the carefully balanced contrasts between tracks create a far more expansive tension arch instead: From the blissful exultations of „Rikshaws on Rash Bihari“ to the jazzy stillness of „Between the Worlds“ and from the soulful reed-harmonies of „What we need“ to the raw Rock-riffing of „The Cobra“, the album moves forward with both grace and an undeniable pulse, its snapshots adding up to a vivid photo album.

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