Cheb i Sabbah: Devotion

To anyone who doesn't know Sabbah's, or indeed Six Degrees' work, this may suggest that Devotion is but another looming dose of cultural tourism, dance-floor fodder made up of plundered vocal samples, loops and beats. There's a lot of it about.

Instead, Devotion is an act of cultural obeisance in which the musicianly Sabbah—amongst the heavy-hitters with whom he's worked are bassist Bill Laswell and the late trumpeter Don Cherry—has created groove music of real substance; and which, despite being dressed in audaciously contemporary clothing, wears its provenance—Hindu, Sikh and Muslim religious and ritual music— in plain view.

Part of Sabbah's secret is the way he approaches his projects. Unlike other DJs turned producers, Sabbah—who at the relatively venerable age of sixty radiates the sense of discovery of someone in his twenties—starts not with a bank of MIDIs but with a blank canvas, creating his music from the bottom up. For Devotion, he traveled to New Delhi and engaged six leading vocalists, together with top local players of traditional string and percussion instruments, adding keyboards, guitar, electric bass—and on one track, banjo—to the mix.

Each of the singers leads on one track (Anup Jalota, India's pre-eminent singer of Hindu kirtans and bhajans, takes two), rooted in his or her own religious tradition and set to a gorgeously orchestrated melange of Indian and western instruments, rhythms and textures. The closing title track was recorded in the pilgrimage city of Varansi, and is an evocative collage of street sounds, temple bells and devotional music.

In defiance of composer Morton Feldman's dictum, "I always leave the concert hall when I start tapping my foot," Devotion—loftily conceived and brilliantly realized—works on several levels, from the visceral to the spiritually uplifting.

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