Fusion sitarist Purbayan Chatterjee plays tonight

The artiste is also recording a unique album online.

Classical music is changing and we are the bearers of a new classical movement,” says Purbayan Chatterjee. The exponent of Hindustani classical sangeet, Chatterjee is a fusion sitarist who adds his sitar riffs to jazz music.

The Kolkata-based artiste is in town to perform an Independence Day recital, at Taj Land’s End, Bandra. “I’ll be playing two sets tonight. One a solo classical recital and the other a jazz-fusion set,” says Chatterjee whose fusion set will include Mumbai’s musicians Gino Banks (drums), Satyajit Talwalkar (tabla) and Zoheb Hussain (keyboards).

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Chatterjee has done much to bring sitar and jazz music together. He’s the founder of Shastriya Syndicate, the first Indian classical band to havetoured the world. On his myriad world tours, he’s also jammed live with folk guitarist Pat Methany, Chick Corea and Bella Fleck.

But his most ambitious projec, where he is recording an album online with a South African jazz guitarist Kunle Ayo and Belgian saxophonist Manuel Hermia, is in production,

“It’s called Trialogue, like a dialogue between three cultures. The album will have world pop. We have mixed traditional Afro jazz and classical European jazz with the sitar,” says Chatterjee, who plans to release the album sometime next year. In the meantime though, Chatterjee is busy making music for Bengali cinema and has hopes of making it big in Bollywood.

“I have some offers that I am currently considering. I like what I hear in Bollywood. It’s a mix of a lot of genres and not traditional anymore. It challenges me to create,” says Chatterjee.