In East-West fusion as we know it here, for instance, the Indian representative is commonly a classical performer, and the bearer of an ancient tradition; the Western representative often a jazz musician, a well-known type of modern, the exhausted romantic who's had enough of modernity, and must renovate himself (it's usually 'himself') through contact with immemorial cultures. If we listen to Hindi film songs or advertisement jingles, however, we realise that 'Indian' music isn't just immemorial: it comprises the classical lineages (themselves fairly modern inventions), regional and folk forms, swing, blues, techno and, with a self-reflexivity that only the creators of the 30-second fillers on MTV seem to tap into, those film songs and jingles themselves.
The random list I’ve produced reminds us how bewilderingly music is located, in class, history, physical environment. One of the more problematic features of fusion is its wide-eyed transcendence not only of nationality but of locality, with the old ideal of the 'universal human being' reworked into the cunning, grasping innocence of our globalised world. And so, while jazz emerged from urban neighbourhoods, and Indian classical music from families and regions, fusion seems to inhabit a continuum without physicality, one that has no smoke, traffic, interiority, weather, or furniture. It's this unmappable continuum that habitually engenders, unsurprisingly, compositions with names like 'Rebirth', 'Destiny', and 'Journey'; and it's this quasi-mystical space that allows compositions to have no clear delineation, and to sound like each other; it's why, after all these years, we have trouble identifying a classic of the genre. Genres, compositions, even the troubled notion of the 'classic', are informed by history and its dissonances; 'fusion', though, belongs to some universalist — now globalised — plane where two unlikes constantly, ardently, embrace, and where conflict is not openly admissible. If fusion still has potentiality, it's because it constitutes a search; not just for interracial contact, but for an idiom adequate to the spaces we've inhabited.
Most importantly, unlike the canonical forms, it has the capacity to abjure domestication; to always remind us, with a degree of mischief, knowledge, and musical conviction, that there is both such a thing, and that there's no such thing, as 'Eastern' and 'Western' music. For me, problems and opportunities present themselves through the fact that there are no clear demarcations of Western and Indian music in my memory, although I do feel these categories exist in tension with one another. At the root of my indecision and ambivalence is, I suspect, my metropolitan upbringing in sixties' and seventies' India, which indefatigably and startlingly reallocated the 'Indian' and the 'Western', in ways we still haven't quite come to terms with. It's a sound that might be true to that hybrid metropolitan milieu, something that might have been born from, and be played in, one of its neighbourhoods, rather than some pointed and repeated gesture of musical commingling, that I’ve been looking for.
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