Back in 2015, India-based Israeli-American artist Shye Ben Tzur, along with Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood (also an Oscar-nominated composer and part of the band The Smile) and folk group The Rajasthan Express created Junun, a cross-cultural collaboration that won acclaim for its haunting fusion of Rajasthani folk, qawwali and experimental music and helped introduce Indian musical traditions to a global audience beyond the usual world music circuit.
A decade later, their second album together – Ranjha – is still slowly permeating the world, and Ben Tzur hopes that the psychedelic, brass-infused, Rajasthani folk-meets-grooves full-length, comprising 11 tracks in Hindi, Urdu and Hebrew, especially strikes a chord with Indian listeners. “I feel that people outside of India, they enjoy it and they love it for whatever it is, and for the music of it, but in India, people can really understand the subtleties, the poetries – they can understand the culture in a very direct way, and I feel that kind of a bond is something that I really hope for this album to be able to kind of reach out,” he tells Rolling Stone India over a video call from Jaffa, Tel Aviv.
Splitting his time between Ajmer and Jaffa, Ben Tzur declares that Ranjha “came from India” even though it was recorded at Greenwood’s Oxfordshire studio in the U.K. That’s a stark difference from Junun, which was created in a few weeks at Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur.
The bandleader says that there was no real pressure to try and “match up” to the internationally lauded Junun when they began working on Ranjha. Greenwood, speaking in a later call from Oxford, tells Rolling Stone India, “I think we felt that we couldn’t reproduce the thought in Jodhpur because it was just the best experience, and we were out of our comfort zone, and we were in this magical place, and that’s the kind of thing you can’t really reproduce. Instead, we thought, let’s have the Rajasthani musicians out of their comfort zone and bring them to England, and do the exact opposite.”
The title track took root from a soundcheck jam that Ben Tzur was having with the band when they were supporting Radiohead on tour in the U.S. for the latter’s album, A Moon Shaped Pool, in 2018. He later went to meet Greenwood in Italy for more writing sessions. There, they discussed the way ahead. Ben Tzur recalls taking a studio approach to recording: “You prepare a kitchen, and it kind of dictates the way that you’re going to cook. Realizing it in advance makes a big difference.”
The Rajasthan Express members are all praise for Greenwood. They’ve known Ben Tzur for decades now, and have developed a new sense of comfort with Greenwood and vice versa. “The recording sessions we did with Jonny [for Ranjha] were a completely different kind of joy and experience. Playing and singing late into the night, sitting together,” Nagara veteran Nathu Lal Solanki says.
Trumpeter Aamir Bhiyani – who has his own brass band in Rajasthan and has performed and recorded with the likes of Salim-Suleiman – recalls the U.K. sessions as extraordinary in terms of Greenwood’s approach. “Even the smallest piece of music, they spent a lot of time on it. Even if it’s just one second of music, even five seconds — we spent four hours on it. We’ve done a single song fifty times over. But only the one take out of fifty that feels right — only that one gets kept,” he says.
Fondly referring to Greenwood as Jonny sahab, Bhiyani says the guitars and bass contributions with Ben Tzur created a fluidity to the music never heard before. “He turns everything to water, just makes it flow effortlessly,” Bhiyani adds.
The artists all agree that they were taken out of familiar settings, but it’s not a complaint. “As soon as you give them their instrument, they’re in their comfort zone, I mean, everything else disappears,” Ben Tzur says about bringing Solanki, Bhiyani and Zakir Ali to Oxford.
The admiration from Greenwood is mutual, considering he’s often mentioned that being part of The Rajasthan Express projects allows him to work with “musicians who hold sincere spiritual beliefs.” He adds, “It’s a crazy privilege, frankly, and what a great way to learn about how Indian classical music is written. It’s very self-indulgent of me, but I bet, what a great way to learn – with good company and good musicians.”
Solanki sums up the songs on Junun as more powerful and intense, whereas Ranjha – especially the title track – is a love story with a marked spiritual element. The nagara drummer concurs with Greenwood’s assessment of Ranjha exuding a spiritual atmosphere, calling the nagara a “significant religious instrument” with an important role in religious traditions. Solanki himself has spent most of his life performing in temples, which is where Ben Tzur got acquainted with him. “Whether you’re singing a devotional bhajan, whether you’re doing something energetic, or playing in a calm and peaceful atmosphere — it works in all these ways. So in this album, we played it in all three ways — the peaceful way, the fast way, and in an English style too. We played it in many different ways. Our style of playing was Rajasthani, also Indian, also classical,” Solanki recalls.
Bhiyani recollects the recording sessions in Oxfordshire when they were making the groovy, catchy title track: “Whenever we’d come out of the studio after recording, we’d have a piece of music we’d just finished, and everyone would be humming it.”
Greenwood adds, “All of these Rajasthani musicians are far more open-minded than us, and we’re just up for anything. We have great respect for the music and the lyrics, but we try not to have the kind of reverence that stops things being creative and being experimental. It’s a fine balance to get right, but I think we got away with it again… I think, I hope.”
“Shiqwa” bursts with energy to give Ranjha an uplifting start, complete with drumming that goes beyond the nagara. It also sees vocalist Zakir Ali switch up his place behind the harmonium and play a Moog synthesizer, which was Greenwood’s idea. Ben Tzur recalls, “The idea is to be inspired. When suddenly Zakir hears the Moog, it talks to him in a different way, or it talks to us – Aamir hears it, and his trumpet goes in a different way. Sam [Petts-Davies, producer] decided to put some pedals on the trumpet, and they played with some effects on it, but let Aamir listen to it, not after you record, but while you’re recording, in order to let you respond to it.”
“Shemesh” opens with a wholly different aspect of Indian traditional music, inviting violinist Jyotsna Srikanth to play in the pensive, almost mournful raaga Todi. “She [Jyotsna] actually played the viola from my childhood, because I was a viola player at school,” Greenwood points out. Alongside Ben Tzur’s flute and guitar, Ali’s harmonium, Ehtisham Khan Ajmeri’s dholak, the group’s qawwali vocalists, Solanki’s nagara and Bhiyani’s trumpet, Greenwood suggested they expand the arrangement further by bringing in additional instruments, including Rajendra Prasanna on shehnai, Kirpal Singh Panesar on esraj and Robert Stillman on bass clarinet.
Greenwood explains, “I’m all for introducing new instruments, but at the same time I sort of obsess over instruments like the veena and other ones, and worry that people aren’t maybe learning it and taking it up like they used to.” He points out that India’s traditional instruments don’t get nearly as much attention as they should. “You can’t preserve culture as though it’s a museum, things have to move and develop, and that’s great, but it’s when things get lost that I get more worried,” he adds. “I’m not scared of change, but I am scared of loss.”
While Tom Skinner adds drums to a few tracks and Greenwood infuses electronics into songs like “Saqi,” the latter was careful not to let Western musical sensibilities overpower the album’s traditional elements. “We were wary of it just drifting into kind of Coke Studio territory, where they sometimes have hard rock drums. It feels like sometimes in those videos, the Indian music is like an ornamentation to the kind of Western rock thing, so instead we wanted to have Tom Skinner’s drums as the ornamentation to the nagara, so the heart of the rhythm is still… it’s just about the Indian rhythms, but Tom Skinner is a jazz drummer as well, and he has a way of listening and playing and becoming part of the group instead of just stamping over it,” he says.
Ultimately, Ranjha feels close to Junun in the way that it showcases the unifying power of music. If listeners have looked into the possible political alignment of Ben Tzur or Greenwood, they have already addressed these concerns in interviews in the past and around the Ranjha album promotions: that they would want an end to the atrocities in Palestine, Lebanon, Israel and beyond. Greenwood told The Telegraph recently that it was “gruesome” when a musician on another project, with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, did not want to be credited on the album, fearing it would feel like an endorsement of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even though that album featured artists from Palestine, Morocco, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Iraq.
Beyond the Urdu and Hindi songs, there are three mind-bending Hebrew songs on Ranjha: “Marbolot,” “Shemesh” and “Aviv.” Ben Tzur explains that the nature-inspired poetry is often about “some sort of a spiritual journey, or an inclination, or longing, or celebrating a spiritual ecstatic moment.” The lyrics are intertwined with Ben Tzur’s decades of Indian classical music training, which shows in the choice he makes. “Shemesh” is in raaga Todi as a morning raaga, while the ecstatic fusion of “Aviv” (“spring” in Hebrew) is inspired by raagas Bahar and Basant. “Even though the song doesn’t sit on these raagas, there’s certainly the feeling of spring,” he says. “Marbolot” (“whirlpool” in Hebrew) is a plea for help, unfolding like a high-energy qawwali song. Elsewhere, the instrumental song “Mustt” comes across as a bridge from the Junun track “Kalandar,” with Ben Tzur leading on the flute.
For Greenwood, being in the studio with Ben Tzur and The Rajasthan Express once again was, quite simply, a way to be a “funk bass player” for a totally different sound. The grooves that drive “Ranjha” and “Ishq-E-Majnun” are prime examples. “Everyone’s coming at this with a different angle, I suppose, and I just want to find these rhythms and basslines that complement it – and in my head – are turning us into James Brown’s backing band,” Greenwood says with a smile.
It becomes clear that the reason an acclaimed mind like him wants to be part of a project like this, when he’s also composing music for films like One Battle After Another, is actually a “bit of fear of missing out.” He adds, “Not wanting to sound like an 18-year-old… I suppose there’s that thing of, ‘I can’t believe I’m going to get to the end of my life and never have played with Indian musicians.’ I just can’t resist wanting to learn and find out more. It’s very addictive and compulsive,” he says.
While Greenwood has only played in India once with Ben Tzur and The Rajasthan Express in 2015 at the Sacred Spirit Festival in Jodhpur after recording had wrapped up at Mehrangarh Fort, the group has gone on to perform minus the Radiohead guitarist several times in India. The most recent instance was Durbar by Godawan in Khetri, Rajasthan in January this year. Bhiyani is brutally honest when he says they should’ve capitalized on the “craze for Junun” a decade ago and released another album sooner to keep touring the world. “But Ranjha will also reach a great height,” he eventually says. Jitin Abraham – a seasoned Indian media and music industry professional – reasons at this point that putting together a tour for a group this size involves a regular amount of knocking on doors of promoters around the world and in India.
Greenwood says they’ve lost money on past tours and it’s “very tough” even now, but hopes that the interest is there. He doesn’t rule out coming to India once again if that’s what it takes. “Maybe playing in India is the only way to do it… I don’t know. We’ll see,” he shrugs.
Ben Tzur says the logistics are being built up over time, often dealing with “complicated visa issues” for band members. “I really wish that different countries will make life easier for artists from India going abroad,” he says. Nevertheless, the band and their management are bullish on Ranjha going global. “We have to always build up long in advance, but eventually it happens, and then the experience is amazing.”