Naïssam Jalal: Landscapes of Eternity

It is impossible to spend any significant amount of time travelling in India without being affected by both its beauty and its poverty. The contrasts between the choking, sprawling metropolises and the river-crossed countryside—with its emerald rice fields and stepped tea plantations—are striking. So too is the chasm between deeply embedded spirituality and the cruel caste system. Then there is the food, the heady festivals and the beguiling music. The senses are bombarded 24/7. As Indian writer Arundhati Roy put it: "India lives in several centuries at the same time." With this splendid album, Naissam Jalal likewise traverses ancient traditions and modernity.

Flautist, singer and composer Jalal has long been fascinated by Hindustani music and wider Indian culture, but as she explains in the liner notes to Landscapes of Eternity, her travels in India had a transformational effect on a personal level. While the song titles already suggest a symbiosis between nature and soul-searching, a single spin of the disc reveals the sense of quest, the depth of emotion and the ultimate resolution in Jalal's music. Meditative and spiritual? Undoubtedly. These five compositions draw heavily on Indian classical traditions. Built broadly around morning and evening ragas, each piece spreads its wings from the enveloping harmonics of Flo Comments' tanpura drones. Yet there is no shortage of passion and virtuosity on display.

Jalal directs her musicians with orchestral flair. A meditative passage of wordless singing and soft flute lyricism takes flight with the injection of Nabankur Bhattacharya's tabla beats, only to soar higher still when Zaza Desiderio's drums come rattling in. Leonardo Montana's comping on piano is central, his colouring and rhythmic gestures supporting the emotional flow of the music. His motif on "Soft Rain on a Silent River"—simple yet potent—is a thing of beauty. Sarod player Sougata Ray Chowdhury and Jalal carve elegant unison lines, while Chowdhury's cascades on "Inner Landscape in Raag Kafi" have a harp-like quality evocative of Alice Coltrane—a clear reference point for Jalal.

Jalal's wordless vocals and flute feel like extensions of one another, occasionally merging into a single voice. Her playing is, for the most part, highly melodious and touchingly lyrical, yet her stormy, snarling improvisation on "Tears in Delhi's Fog" is free jazz in spirit—a cathartic release. Here and there, single lines of verse by the mystic poet Kabir serve as vehicles for singer Samrat Pandit, who juggles a word—or even a single syllable—with extraordinary acrobatic freedom. Individual interventions sparkle throughout, but it is the uplifting power of the ensemble passages that most impresses, underlining Jalal's credentials as a composer and ensemble leader of real distinction.

It is entirely fitting that Landscapes of Eternity should be so beautifully packaged, with Jalal's extensive notes—on both the background to the project and the emotional and technical genesis of each composition—presented in a ruby-red slipcase as elegant and artful as the music within.