In 2015, Israeli singer-songwriter Shye Ben Tzur, Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood and more than a dozen of Rajasthan’s finest singers, folk musicians and horn players convened in Mehrangarh, a towering 15th-century sandstone fort in Jodhpur, to record Junun. Ben Tzur and Greenwood wanted to unite devotional Sufi qawwali vocal traditions with the sound of Rajasthani brass bands, crafting songs that emerged from the same soil but sprouted into something altogether new.
The release received the kind of Western media coverage that albums focused on Indian music rarely command – The Sunday Times made it their Album of the Year. Oscar-winning director Paul Thomas Anderson’s accompanying documentary brought the project even more crossover attention, and the group went on to tour with Radiohead in 2017 and 2018.
Junun’s success was, in some ways, its own problem. “There’s no modest way to say this,” explains Jonny Greenwood, sunk into an armchair at home, “but we felt like Junun couldn’t have been bettered. To try and repeat that experience felt like it might be diminishing returns.” For the follow-up album, Ranjha, they did the opposite and invited the Rajasthani musicians to come to Greenwood’s Oxfordshire studio.
Due to the nature of the songs, devotion needed to remain at the centre. In Rajasthan, the qawwals (singers) perform at dargahs (Sufi shrines) and the brass bands lead juloos (religious parades) – each form rooted in a specific sacred place. Speaking from his home in Jaffa, Shye Ben Tzur describes how he tried to hold on to that sense of sacred space when the music left India. “I suddenly thought, what if the shrine was not in Rajasthan? What if that focal point of worship was not specific, but floating in space? How would it sound, the shrine in space?” He laughs, remembering how Greenwood and the album’s producer, Sam Petts-Davies, would question him during the recording, “Shye, is this enough ‘shrine in space’ for you?”
Ben Tzur was born in New York City and raised in Israel. He had his musical epiphany at 19 when he saw Hariprasad Chaurasia and the late Zakir Hussain perform at the Jerusalem Festival in 1996. He dropped everything and moved to India to study music, eventually marrying the daughter of a Sufi scholar and settling in Ajmer, Rajasthan – home to the dargah of the 12th-century Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti – where he lived for the better part of two decades. “I think lots of people go to India for a couple of weeks and say it’s changed them,” remarks Greenwood. “I think Shye has totally changed. Not that I knew him as a teenager, but he was in a heavy metal band when he was 17; it’s quite a change.”
Greenwood first became aware of Ben Tzur while attending a Bedouin festival in the Negev desert. After he saw a local band, one song, a fusion of Arabic and Indian traditional music, stood out. He discovered it was written by Ben Tzur. “His reputation as a songwriter preceded him,” recalls Greenwood. He sought out Ben Tzur in Israel and then joined him onstage when he played his first UK show, at the Southbank Centre, in 2014. Junun grew out of that encounter.
The two of them have been in constant dialogue since, songs being created whenever opportunities arise. They begin as Ben Tzur’s sketches. Sometimes he will write original lyrics in Hebrew, other times they will be based on the poetry of Sufi saints. He then passes the ideas to Greenwood before they are performed with the Rajasthan Express ensemble. “Shye tends to write things with one or two chords, so every time you hear a chord change, that’s probably my interference,” explains Greenwood. “I just can’t resist imposing some kind of harmonic change on it, some structure, but it’s a fine line.”
He picks out the example of ‘Saqi’ from the new album. “I was thinking I’ve got to be cautious about these chord changes, but one of the singers was crying. He said it made it more emotional, more lifting. I suppose I worry more about being over-respectful and over-cautious, that there’s something patronising in not assuming that these musicians aren’t going to embrace things being different. And they do. They totally do.”
As with Junun, Ranjha features many of the same Rajasthan Express musicians and instruments. There are lead qawwali vocals, as well as nagara kettle drums, dholak hand drums, trumpet and a chorus of backing singers – over 20 artists contribute to the album. “We were sat in a big circle all playing together,” remembers Greenwood. “I was playing either bass or the guitar, and sometimes Shye was playing guitar as well.” Greenwood would later add overdubs of bass, programmed drums, keyboards and one of his favourite instruments, the rather unusual ondes Martenot, an early electronic device. “There’s a lot of groove. There are different colours. To my ears it’s much more psychedelic,” says Ben Tzur of the new album. “When we’re playing and there’s keyboards and guitars on it”, adds Greenwood, “I’m trying to turn it into [krautrock band] Can, with 80s synthesizers. It’s like with Radiohead, you aim high. You go, ‘Let’s make this sound like a Miles Davis track’. You would never say that in public, and you never get anywhere close, but you usually end up somewhere interesting.”
But Ranjha breaks a number of conventions established for Junun. That album only featured Rajasthani musicians and Indian percussion, but Greenwood now brings jazz drummer Tom Skinner (who plays with Greenwood and Thom Yorke in The Smile) into the fold, and they invited Indian-British Carnatic violinist Jyotsna Srikanth. One major difference saw qawwali singer and harmonium player Zakir Ali Qawwal given a Moog in place of his usual instrument. “Its rhythms and timbres might be different,” says Ben Tzur, “but they’re still conveying the same feeling. It’s about trying to understand what the core things are, even within the tradition, that could take a different shape.”
There were also changes brought about by circumstance. Zakir’s brother, Zaki Ali Qawwal, who sang on Junun, died during rehearsals. “It was just after COVID,” recalls Ben Tzur. “We were rehearsing in Ajmer in front of the Sufi shrine for Hazrat Khadim Hasan Gudri Shah Baba III, whose poetry we use in the album. Suddenly Zaki doesn’t feel well; he doesn’t feel his leg. A few minutes afterwards, he was not there anymore. He had a stroke.” The Punjabi Sufi poet Baba Bulleh Shah gives the album its title-track. ‘Ranjha’ is one of his celebrated poems, often performed to music. “There’s something unifying in its concept of love,” says Ben Tzur.
Ranjha arrives at a politically tense time for Greenwood. Aside from his soundtrack work – his latest, for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (2025) was nominated for an Oscar and a BAFTA – his last album was Jarak Qaribak, a collaborative album with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa. The album features interpretations of classic love songs from across the Middle East, sung by vocalists from countries not associated with that song.
The duo were preparing to perform the album in London when the October 7 attacks took place in Israel in 2023, leading to the ongoing war in Gaza. The shows were cancelled, with new dates arranged in London and Bristol in 2025. These were ultimately cancelled too, following pressure from campaigners such as the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. They drew on the fact that Greenwood and Tassa had performed in Tel Aviv in 2024, a day after Greenwood had joined peace protests in the city. Video also emerged of Dudu Tassa performing to IDF soldiers in 2023. Tassa has since clarified that the event happened in October 2023, before the conflict had escalated and stressed that his intentions were peaceful. He also gave the IDF 400 guitars, which he said were so the soldiers could make music not war, adding that Israel has an extensive conscription of young people, many of whom do not condone violence.
In their campaign to stop Greenwood and Tassa’s shows, the BDS stated: “Crossing the Palestinian picket line and performing in apartheid Israel during its genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza is to consciously whitewash – or artwash – Israel’s genocide and underlying 76-year-old regime of settler-colonial apartheid.”
Greenwood and Tassa released a joint statement following the cancellations, claiming they were censored and silenced, denouncing the campaigns for “forcing musicians not to perform and denying people who want to hear them an opportunity to do so”. They stressed that the core goal of their project is to bring people together across the Middle East. Greenwood, whose wife was born in Israel, finds the accusation of artwashing perplexing. “The implication is that books are being written or records or films are being made in a devious and underhanded way to apologise for the collective sins of a people. I think people make music to make music. Dudu Tassa and the Lebanese, Syrian and Moroccan singers [on Jarek Qaribak] are all working together on the songs that they love.”
It’s clear that the boycott campaign hasn’t affected his desire to make music with whoever he sees fit. “I’ve certainly had people say to me, ‘Wow, you’re working with an Israeli?’ There is that attitude. But, the whole point of projects like this is that they’re not interested in borders and politics.” He adds that he’s just finished recording a new album with Tassa, continuing the idea of recording Arabic songs across the Middle East, and adding that they have been working with Iranian musicians. “When we get together, we don’t talk politics, we talk about our favourite Mohammed Abdel Wahab record or we daydream about being in Cairo in the 1950s and being able to see Oum Kalthoum perform, or we get nostalgic for 1970s Beirut and the nightclub culture there. That’s where our heads are at.”
Ben Tzur clearly struggles for words when discussing the crisis in the Middle East: “I don’t think anybody who watches what’s going on and has some conscience can feel like everything is great. It’s a heartbreaking situation.” In December 2024, he performed at a festival called Woodstock for Peace in Shitim, Israel, arranged with the intention of bringing together Israelis and Palestinians. “It was people in a very hard reality trying to spend their time and energy, meeting people who are alike in a way, saying we want to come together. That was a very beautiful moment at a time which is very complicated.”
He reveals that they discussed postponing Ranjha’s release because of the political climate, asking, “Should we wait? What should we do?” They ultimately decided, and hoped, that music could act as some form of relief. “I don’t think that music makes a change in a global way, but I can say that music changed my life. It drifted me from this small place I grew up in, and opened me up to a whole new culture. This is something that music can do. It can give you an inspiration.”