Georgia Straight, Vancouver, December 18th, 2003.

Off Beat
Tandava Travels the World
By Alexander Varty

Coming out of silence, the haunting sound of an erhu sketches out a plaintive melody. It sounds like sunrise, like an invocation of dawn, and the sensation is only strengthened when a wooden flute joins in, circling the Chinese violin's tune with warm-toned spirals of sound. Chimes and gongs and a subtle, indeterminate drone complete the picture--but the spell is broken after a minute or so, when an assertive tabla starts up, causing flute and erhu to spin off into a glorious dance, backed by slippery marimba and a two-note bass line that could have been lifted from the Yardbirds.

Eventually a singer enters and it becomes obvious that this lovely music has its roots in South Asia; in fact, the tune is called "Dooare Aishachey", and it's an old Bengali folksong about death and living an honest life. But in the hands of Tandava, whose demo we've been listening to, the music is both authentic and unbounded by tradition. Singer, guitarist, and flutist Prashant John's ancestors would recognize the song and its message, but it's never been played like this before.

It's possible that John's forebears would also recognize the impulse to update and expand their cultural heritage. For although Tandava's founder says that he's been into his particular version of cross-cultural fusion "for quite a while", the more he talks the more obvious it becomes that he was born into a world where old boundaries were breaking down and new sounds emerging.

"I remember being given a harmonica, and I started learning tunes on that," says John, who was born in Bangladesh and emigrated to Canada in 1972. "My father also used to play the accordion," he continues, on the line from his East Vancouver home, "and I was the only kid [in my family] who, at the age of five or something, would spend as much time as I could around anyone playing an instrument. So I learned all these really old songs, both western and Indian. And, of course, I went through the popular music of our time--in the 1960s, we'd listen to the stuff that was current in the West--as well as the folk music of our area. As a teenager, I started to focus on western music; the few of us that played the guitar had to figure everything out for ourselves, because there was no one to turn to for instruction."

John's guitar skills are evident in the two original compositions that join "Dooare Aishachey" on Tandava's untitled demo CD: "Common Ground" mixes a blues-rock introduction with a circular picking pattern that wouldn't sound out of place in Mali or Morocco, while "Thai Sunrise" suggests that John McLaughlin's groundbreaking work with the group Shakti must have been an influence. Even more noticeable, though, is that Tandava is a group, not one musician's dream project: John may be the band's founder, leader, and chief composer, but without the contributions of the other performers, the end result would sound very different.

"It was a question of finding musicians who were first into world music" John explains, adding that he'd been thinking about forming a band like Tandava for a long time. Its exact lineup didn't fall into place until he attended an Orchid Ensemble concert a couple of years ago, however. "I was blown away," he recalls, and it didn't take him long to convince percussionist Jonathan Bernard and erhu virtuoso Lan Tung that they needed a second outlet for their musicality.

"I thought 'Wow, the possibilities are endless,' and to be quite honest, even now there's so much more that can be done. We've just started really using their abilities and their styles to compose around.

With tabla player Stefan Cihelka completing the quartet, Tandava is rapidly emerging as one of the most exciting groups on Vancouver's burgeoning world-music scene. It's a winning combination--and this listener, for one, can hardly wait to hear more.

~ Alexander Varty