Road Rasa
Vadi Records (53 mins)
Following up an impressive 2021 solo debut Vignettes, British sitarist Tommy Khosla introduces their ensemble Jawari, together with saxophone, guitars and percussion, completed by poetry from Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay and featuring a cadre of international friends. The collective is ambitious in the number and range of its influences – Road Rasa is a journey through jazz, lo-fi hip-hop, spoken-word, Indian classical, electronica, Latin, soul, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic music… even the track titles themselves are eclectic, using at least seven writing systems across the 16 tracks, by my count. The music is enjoyable; it’s obviously crafted by a bunch of talented and enthusiastic artists, and spans a range of intensities and moods. I do think this first album suffers from the same difficulty as a lot of these ‘all the influences’ projects, in that it’s quite hard to pin down – the eclecticism sometimes obscures what they want their sound to say. This is a promising project, and a tighter focus may take Jawari’s music to the next level in the future.