During our long chat, I asked him, “Which guitar players blow you away—who do you really vibe on?” I’d seen the famously opinionated Albini answer similar questions before, but I knew that he was a guy who was constantly evolving and would have a good answer.
Shellac’s To All Trains was released on May 17—10 days after Albini passed away suddenly.
This section of the interview didn’t make it to print since it fell a little outside of the theme of the rest of the piece. With it sitting here on my hard drive, I’ve come back to the list quite a few times. Shellac released what will be their final album, To All Trains, shortly after his passing, and I’ve been listening to it, stunned by its sheer electric vitality and the band’s pummeling wit (what other band can go from using “pulchritudinous” with comedic self-consciousness as on “Days Are Dogs,” to singing about “Scabby the Rat” just a couple tracks later?). Somehow, Shellac seemed to have always lived within the same world of hard-hitting interlocking rhythms and perfectly recorded sound across their discography, and yet the band evolved in unexpected increments with every record. (Has Albini’s guitar ever sounded so brutal as when he kicks on the Harmonic Percolator—unconfirmed, but a confident guess—on the opening “WSOD”?)
With each listen of To All Trains, I’ve thought about the depth in Steve’s playing that I’ve always known was there, but which he further revealed with his wide range of answers. Some of the players he mentioned are pillars behind his own angular, cutting riffage, and others will probably come as a surprise to even the deepest Albini enthusiasts.
Here’s the answer he gave:
Billy Strings
Well, I’ve seen a lot of people in the studio and my impression of them is formed from fairly close exposure. That’s different from when I’m just listening to somebody play and I’m impressed by their playing, or I’m impressed by their music. I admire somebody like Billy Strings who’s just a phenomenal flatpicker. His bluegrass guitar is cleaner and more inventive than anything that I can imagine in that idiom.
Derek Trucks
Or somebody like Derek Trucks, for example. He is a really expressive, really beautiful player in service of music that doesn’t do a thing for me. Like, Derek Trucks playing in any of the ensembles that he plays in is the highlight of the thing. I don’t think I could sit through one of those shows just waiting for him to hit the solo. I would’ve made it to the exit long before he got to a solo, unfortunately. But I think he’s a phenomenal player.
Junior Brown’s another one who really blows my mind. Danny Gatton is an incredible guitar player. But again, all of that’s in service of music that doesn’t really do a lot for me in the punk and underground world.The Jesus Lizard's Duane Denison
Duane Denison from the Jesus Lizard is maybe the cleanest player that I’ve ever worked with as a recording engineer. His technique is just exceptional. Never hits a clam, never hits a dead note. You can always hear every note in the chord, even when he is playing something that sounds chaotic and brutal. Take two is going to be chaotic and brutal in precisely the same way.
The Ex's Terrie Hessels
I really admire Terrie Hessels from the Dutch punk band the Ex. I’m certain that he doesn’t know the names of the notes on the strings of his guitar. But every time I see them, he does something on the guitar that makes me think, “Why didn’t I think of that? That’s so cool and so easy. Why am I bothering playing notes and chords and stuff?”
One time we did a show with them, and at one point, he was wearing his guitar around his neck, and he popped it off, and he put the headstock on the ground. It was a vacuum cleaner, and he started running back and forth across the stage with the headstock of his guitar scraping and bouncing on the floor. So, he wasn’t playing the guitar, he was using the guitar to play the stage, and it sounded awesome. It sounded like this big zooming noise, and you could hear every step he took sort of modulated. I think he’s an incredible guitar player.
Ty Segall
As far as guys who are just good at it, I’ve done a few records with Ty Segall, and I think he’s really underrated. His whole band is great. Ty’s really inventive—great sound, always really cool arrangements.
Dead Meadow
I have a kind of a weakness for jammy psychedelic hard rock, which isn’t at all the kind of stuff that I play as a musician, but I really love the band Dead Meadow. Their music is just a trip. Every song, you feel like the lights are out and you’re seeing things. I just love their music.
Uzeda's Agostino Tilotta
There’s an Italian guitar player that I really love named Agostino Tilotta. He’s the guitar player in a band called Uzeda that I’ve had the pleasure of recording and touring with a few times. He has another band called Bellini, which is a little bit more abstract. He’s a phenomenal guitar player, really just incredible, expressive, inventive guitar player. He plays things that sound like they could be taken from Sicilian folk music, but then he also does things that sound like modernist classical music or noise-rock freakouts and stuff.
Johnny Ramone
My first real inspiration as a guitar player, though, was Johnny Ramone. Those early Ramones records just sounded so brutal and so explosive. And then you’d see footage of him playing, and he’s using his whole arm to play the guitar at this incredible speed and—the same sort of deal with Duane Denison—just never hitting a bad note, like never blowing it ever, never not being in time, never not being in tune. Everything about it, just so precise and so good, but at maximum scale.
Shannon Wright
My favorite guitarist is Shannon Wright. She’s got a unique attacking finger-plucking style that she hybridizes with a big Doritos-shaped pick that she palms while she’s doing the plucking part, then produces like a magician for the strumming parts. It’s incredible and her performing style is energetic and she’s just the fucking best.
George Alessandro, SG in hand, stands in front of his 1/2 AZZ v2 prototype, which runs through an exquisite pair of vintage Marshall 4x12s.
Standing in his workshop, I see the evidence of the legendary amp guru’s current puzzle, the AZZ line. Alessandro is working out the finer details of some updates on the 100-watt AZZ head. His 50-watt 1/2 AZZ—fractions designate the power of the model, with the 1/4 and 2/5 also available, and plans for a 1/8 in the works—is probably the most visible these days, accompanying Derek Trucks around the country onstage.
“George has been working on my amps for years,” Trucks says, “and has always been willing to experiment and help us chase down our sound.”
Like Leo Fender and Jimmy Bryant—or whichever builder/player pair you choose—these two masters of their crafts share a mutually beneficial relationship. “Trucks is one of the best examples of how, when I do my job right, I can literally watch the artist in real-time, the first time they’re playing it live, open up and go places I’ve never seen before,” Alessandro says.
Alessandro’s Tweedle A—a tweed-inspired combo named in homage to Dumble—sits at left, next to a custom-order tweed Deluxe build.
Photo by Nick Millevoi
The 1/2 AZZ is, in part, a result of their collaboration. The slide maestro, whose Super Reverbs have spent time on Alessandro’s bench, helped the builder guide the development of the amp. “He’s been a guinea pig for some of the designs—the ones that he needed,” Alessandro elaborates. “I was developing it around him. With the tier that [Tedeschi Trucks Band] are on right now, they’re trying to push the envelope. Developing the 1/2 AZZ for him, we were finding limitations of the platform. He helped me find a couple things that I, as a mortal human being, could never find. But for him, as one of the gods, it took us a while to find all the boundaries. If I can make it a limitless journey, then I did my job right.”
Hanging out in Alessandro’s Bucks County, Pennsylvania, workshop is an immersive thing, an opportunity to experience the whole story. Here, I get the chance to take the AZZ v2 for a spin. Loaded with four 5881s and running through a pair of vintage Marshall cabs, this thing is a true powerhouse.
Plugging into the amp using a pair of vintage SGs—to say something like “expertly set up” wouldn’t even tell the story; both of these things just really, really rip—my head is exploding. And that’s not because it’s loud, which, of course, it is. But this rig is extraordinarily dynamic and sensitive to every little pick and finger nuance I offer it. It’s a lithe beast, ready to amplify and accentuate anything I give it. And it’s quiet at idle, so I can sit here and intermittently chat while I pick lightly and have a normal conversation, and then dig in and I’m back at full volume, practically levitating on a bed of gain, always with a vibrant, full-bodied tone that makes me want to sell all my other amps and commit to this rig for life. If only I thought any gig I ever play would allow me to throw a full stack on their stage….
One corner of Alessandro’s workshop, where the 1/2 AZZ v2 is warming up near a pile of transformers.
Photo by Nick Millevoi
Next to the AZZ, I plug into Alessandro’s take on a tweed Deluxe. He figured that circuit out long ago, but he’s still excited about the classic designs. While he doesn’t typically build these, this one is a custom order from a client—I get the feeling he can’t say no to digging into an old circuit—and it’s loaded with the Eminence Eric Johnson EJ1250 that Alessandro co-designed. Just like a 5E3, it’s louder than it looks. And just like a 5E3, it does the saggy Neil Young thing everyone playing this circuit should aspire to. Basically, this sounds exactly like a 5E3, with—just maybe, because I’m not A/B-ing—a little more punch. In fact, I’d venture that this is probably how a new tweed Deluxe sounded back in the ’50s.
So, that thing he told me up at the top, about losing interest once he’s built an amp? It’s simply not true. I mean, I’m not calling George a liar—he’s a forward-thinking dude, and that’s what he’s imparting. But he essentially has the AZZ line figured out, and definitely learned everything there is to learn about the tweed Deluxe long ago, and he’s still thrilled about both, and much more.
Tedeschi Trucks Band - Layla (Live at LOCKN' / 2019) (Official Music Video)
Derek Trucks and Doyle Bramhall II reach for the sky with a pair of Alessandro 1/2 AZZs close at hand during Tedeschi Trucks Band’s Layla Revisited (Live at LOCKN’) concert.
High-End Reputation
“Buy my amps before I die!” Alessandro jokingly exhorted as I entered his workshop. He’d just gotten off a call where he learned about the recent astronomical sale price of a Trainwreck amp built by his late friend and mentor, the legendary Ken Fisher.
Alessandro is sensitive about not overstating his relationship with Fisher. “He saw something in me,” he says. “I don’t want to say took me under his wing, but he was very kind and gracious. It was an opportunity I relish and I appreciate having him in my life.” As Alessandro tells it, their meeting came at just the right time, and it was Fisher who gave Alessandro the push he needed.
Growing up in the Philadelphia burbs during the ’80s as an SRV-obsessed teenager, Alessandro purchased a ’59 Bassman that “just wasn’t happening.” He took it to a few area techs, all returning it with the same result. But “I was just getting into learning electronics,” he remembers, so he opened it up and realized that a broken capacitor had eluded each of the techs. “I changed that one part out and the amp came to life.”
An example of one of Alessandro’s handwired Twin Reverbs, with visibly meticulous wiring and Alessandro-branded components.
Photo by Nick Millevoi
That was all Alessandro needed to catch the bug, and he started tinkering with old amps, soon doing repairs for local players. This experience served as a deep educational phase, and the timing was kismet. “There’s a whole learning curve on how amps age,” he observes. “What happens to a ’59 Bassman at year 20, at year 40, at year 60? I was of the generation where I came in on year 25, so I was coming in when it was a perfect time to learn.”
Eventually, one of his early clients inspired him to build an amp of his own. The request was to put an extra gain stage into a black-panel Bassman. After trying it in his client’s amp, Alessandro decided to build this circuit from scratch in the chassis of a Sunn Solarus. This build became his first prototype, which he called the Hound Dog Redbone.
A pre-med student working on amps in his free time, Alessandro took the amp to Fisher’s house for their first meeting, and they hit it off. It wasn’t long before Fisher gave him his first taste of hype. “He got me my first press,” he remembers. “He was writing for Vintage Guitar and basically said this Hound Dog is the closest thing to a Trainwreck. And from that point, my phone never stopped ringing for two years. I had orders coming in from all over the world before I was even a company.”
As he graduated from college, he looked at his potential spend on medical school and compared it to the auspicious start of his fledgling amp business, and decided to make a go at the latter. When he developed his second Hound Dog model—another “brutal 50-watter”—Alessandro tipped his cap to the elder builder, naming it the Bloodhound, after Fisher’s dog. He soon developed a full line, also including high-end low-power heads.
Somewhere along the way there was a cease-and-desist for the Hound Dog name, but Alessandro got some sage advice. “Bob Benedetto took me aside,” he explains. “He was like, ‘George, you’re Italian, you have a great last name, why don’t you use it?’” Thus, Alessandro High-End Products was born, reflecting his growing interest in hi-fi audio.
“When I started hearing what high-end audio sounded like, it was a mind-opening experience.”
“When I started hearing what high-end audio sounded like,” he explains, “it was a mind-opening experience. By utilizing better materials properly, you could elevate the product.” That included everything from building hi-fi style transformers, to eventually using his own Alessandro-branded components.
He developed a reputation for meticulously building amps at the highest level that quickly spread to the most elite circles in the guitar universe. Early adopters included Sammy Hagar, Billy Gibbons, and Eric Johnson. Just above his workshop desk hangs a photo of the builder and B.B. King, who he says was a good friend, both holding up an Alessandro catalog at his 30th birthday party. And at this point, the list has grown to be quite extensive. It’s not hard to find one of Alessandro’s amps onstage or in the studio with any number of rock stars, from Joe Perry to John Mayer to David Gilmour. And when I ask George about Gilmour’s very visible use of his Bluetick and Redbone Special, he shows me another photo on his desk of the Pink Floyd guitarist and his Alessandros sitting in with Jeff Beck.
Onstage with the Tedeschi Trucks Band, Derek Trucks rocks a 1/2 AZZ and Crossbreed. Both Derek and Susan Tedeschi are running Super Reverbs that have spent time on the builder’s bench and are loaded with Alessandro’s signature Eminence speakers.
Photo by Stuart Levine
Handwired Access
My field trip to the Alessandro workshop wasn’t my first exposure to George’s work. Growing up in Philly, I was lucky enough to count hanging out at a small, family-owned guitar store as one of my first jobs. A few select customers would come in and talk about a guy a few towns over who was doing work for Gilmour and Eric Johnson, and who would put an amp in a gold-plated chassis for the price of a small sedan. My curiosity was piqued. When he introduced his old Working Dog line, targeted at gigging musicians, the amps came through the store and I plugged into the first boutique models I’d ever tried. Despite their reasonable prices, they were still out of my reach, but I never forgot that first taste.
As I got deeper into amps, and vintage amps specifically, I cycled through all the local techs—just like George did in the ’80s. I’d always known he was there, but the high-end Alessandro clientele led me to assume he was off limits for repairs, or at least prohibitively expensive. It was only recently, when I became a client myself, that I learned how wrong I was.While it’s partially Alessandro’s love of vintage amps that keeps him available for repairs and restorations, he also wants to work for working musicians at all levels, including those who can’t afford or justify a high-end amp (or at least one that commands five figures). “I definitely want to be approachable for any level of musician to purchase our product,” he tells me. “Because I do want to be able to inspire and get a good product into the hands of younger musicians or working musicians.”
To do so, he’s come up with a clever way to make his work more accessible, and that’s his handwire service.
The concept is simple: A customer brings Alessandro a modern consumer-grade amp—a reissue Fender or Marshall—and he’ll rebuild it by hand. He explains that his goal is “to at least equal what Fender was doing in 1964 and ’65. But if I can, what would happen if they continued to evolve it?”
And while he could build that from scratch easily, the rebuild concept is pragmatic. “I can’t build from scratch what we offer with the handwire service.”
So, he’s designed a circuit board that’s easily reproducible. “We gut the whole thing. The only thing left in there is the transformers and tube sockets—it’s very efficient.” And it keeps costs down. So, starting at $525 for a Princeton Reverb—you can, of course, keep upgrading beyond that—you can have a handwired amp that Alessandro says he’ll “put up against a vintage Princeton Reverb any day.”
“I definitely want to be approachable for any level of musician to purchase our product. Because I do want to be able to inspire and get a good product into the hands of younger musicians or working musicians.”
David Gilmour - Time/Breathe (Reprise) (Live At Pompeii)
Is there really any better way to make a case for a great amp than seeing a video of David Gilmour playing it at Pompeii? Here he is from 2017’s Live at Pompeii with a pair of Alessandro heads behind him in the hazy distance.
And that’s not sales talk. Frankly, George doesn’t have time for that. Just talking to him, it’s clear he only spends time on stuff he’s into, and lets his reputation do the rest. Take a look at his website, for example. It’s a sparse landing pad, featuring some information about most of what Alessandro High-End Products has to offer. If it feels like maybe there’s more available than you see, that just might be the case.
The Alessandro social media pages are a better way to see what he’s up to, but their long scroll of amp demo videos still maintain the mystique around his work. Of course, we, as tone hunters, absolutely love our elite-level amp builders to have mystique around their work, and that’s the level Alessandro is working on.
If you really want to know what George can offer and maybe find out if you can afford one of his amps, or even just talk about whether that’s right for you, you’ll have to go right to the source and have a conversation.
And how does someone do that?
He says, simply, “The people who need to know me find me.”
Bhattacharya invented the chaturangui in the mid ’90s to combine elements of the 6-string guitar with the Indian instruments the sarod and the sitar.
That experience of hearing Khan for the first time never left Bhattacharya’s memory, and he would hear the virtuoso’s sarod on the radio constantly while growing up. Bhattacharya calls it soul-stirring music, crediting Khan with creating a sort of “melodic kingdom. For me, my shelter, my bedroom of music, was Ustad [an honorific title meaning ‘master’] Ali Akbar Khan’s music,” says Bhattacharya.
“It’s about how this music develops and connects your life: how your muscles, your mind, your spirit, your blood, and your tensions all are connected to your music.”
In his 20s, seeking a closer relationship to Khan’s mastery, Bhattacharya sought out Brij Bhushan Kabra—pioneer of Indian slide guitar and one of Khan’s disciples—and asked to study under him. He spent 10 years living with Kabra, his guru, learning his theory and approach to playing music. It was during that time that Bhattacharya met Khan, who asked Kabra to send Bhattacharya to his Calcutta residence to perform for him. For the next decade, Bhattacharya would visit Khan each year and stay with him for a month, absorbing his teachings.
Today, like his gurus, Bhattacharya has become a musical legend, with a career that spans nearly 50 years. He’s shared stages with jazz-fusion guitarist John McLaughlin, Derek Trucks, and Jerry Douglas, earned two Grammy nominations, and released over a score of full-length recordings. And this January, Bhattacharya has built upon that legacy with the release of The Sound of the Soul, a four-song, 66-minute album dedicated to Khan.
A Conversation with Pdt Debashish Bhattacharya on Indian Slide Guitar
“In this performance, since it was fully improvised, it was like a dialogue, a dialogue between the melody and the rhythm.”
Bhattacharya describes the creation of The Sound of the Soul as a pure, elemental experience, reminiscent of what he calls a sacred and total relationship with his gurus. “It’s not learning note-for-note music,” he says. “It’s about how this music develops and connects your life: how your muscles, your mind, your spirit, your blood, and your tensions all are connected to your music. This cannot be passed on without a guru and disciple relationship.
“[This release] doesn’t have any clicks or pops to please any ear, whether it’s Eastern, Western, Southern, or Northern,” he continues. “I just closed my eyes and I lost myself in the studio. When I finished, I woke up like, ‘What happened? What am I doing?’ I thought this album would be the humbly best thing I can offer. My soul is connected to [Khan].”
In performance, Bhattacharya guides the music fluidly, focusing on the dialogue between melody and rhythm.
Unlike Khan, Bhattacharya doesn’t play sarod; his performance on The Sound of the Soul is entirely on the chaturangui, a hybrid slide guitar of his own design that mixes traditional Indian and Western guitar styles. The work is a celebration of his teacher, and also of cultural exchange, of borderless musical exploration.
On the album, Bhattacharya is accompanied only by percussionists Swapan Chaudhuri and Akhilesh Gundecha. The centerpiece of the release is the 39-minute saga “To His Lotus Feet.” Its title epitomizes Bhattacharya’s devotion to Khan. In the piece, the trio takes listeners on an odyssey as they glide through movements and moods, from serene, nighttime soundscapes to thrilling, up-tempo melodic sprints. Nothing was orchestrated ahead of time; the entire track is improvised. How does Bhattacharya know when the song is finished, when enough has been said?
“If you’re a story writer or script writer for a film, you know where to stop, and you know where to end it. It’s under your control,” he says. “You can end three minutes later or five minutes earlier. Unless you are satisfied, you won’t leave it. In this performance, since it was fully improvised, it was like a dialogue, a dialogue between the melody and the rhythm. I almost drowned in that raga. But when it ended, it ended.”
That approach and everything else about Bhattacharya’s musical foundation can be traced back to Calcutta, his hometown. The sprawling West Bengal capital is home to scores of different cultures and traditions—in particular an intense blend of European and Indian cultures, a result of British colonization.
The guitarist’s latest release is dedicated to Ali Akbar Khan, under whom Bhattacharya studied.
Late at night, after local radio programs had gone quiet, syndicated shows from the BBC and other stations would come in faintly to Calcutta’s radios. When Bhattacharya was as young as two or three, these airwaves exposed him to European classical music and Hawaiian slide guitar, and the sounds lodged themselves in his brain alongside classical Hindustani ragas played on sarods and sitars. He came to realize that they complemented one another: the Hawaiian slide style paired strikingly well with the Hindustani tradition’s melodies, which were characterized by seamless changes in pitch.
“I was almost dragged in this path. ‘I have to make this; I have to learn this.’”
When Bhattacharya was just 3 years old, his father bought him his first guitar. It was made of local plywood, with a small sound box and a 24" scale length—and Bhattacharya instinctively wanted to mix the Hawaiian and Hindustani musical traditions. From a young age, he learned not just Hindustani music and ragas, but also Western notation. His guitar teacher had learned how to play American slide guitar styles from a local European musician and passed this on to Bhattacharya. But the 6-string guitar, while useful for Hawaiian slide music, didn’t have the same range and power of traditional Indian instruments. The reverse was true of the sarod and sitar; they weren’t optimized for slide playing.
Still, Bhattacharya pursued a brave, brash mixing of the two sounds. His vision is revered now, but he says this wasn’t always so. “Western guitarists thought I played good slide guitar, but I played Indian classical music,” he says. “Indian classical music fraternity thought, ‘Okay, he’s a very nice classical musician, but why is he playing slide guitar?’” Bhattacharya calls these feelings his “triggers”: “I was almost dragged in this path. ‘I have to make this; I have to learn this.’”
Debashish Bhattacharya's Gear
When Bhattacharya was just a toddler, he listened to Hawaiian slide guitar and classical Hindustani ragas, both of which informed his musical vision.
Guitars
- Chaturangui
Mics
- Neumann KMR 81-i
Strings and Slides
- John Pearse strings
- John Pearse slide
- Diamond Bottlenecks crystal tone-bar
Through his 20s, he worked to develop what would become the chaturangui: an instrument which would capture the breadth of influence he carried within him. Early attempts included a jumbo body with a round soundhole, then an archtop-style with f-holes, but neither yielded the depth of sound Bhattacharya was chasing. During a trip to the U.S. in 1993, Mary Faith, the owner of John Pearse Strings, gifted him with a Weissenborn slide guitar, a rare hollow-neck model created by the luthier Hermann Weissenborn. Bhattacharya took it home, opened it up, and experimented with it, adding elements from the construction to his own guitar.
In 1994, after years of prototyping and trial-and-error, Bhattacharya completed his masterpiece. The chaturangui lap-steel guitar had a hollow neck and a normal 6-string configuration along with three extra sets of strings: two additional rhythm strings just past the high strings, two drone strings on the bass side of the neck, and 14 sympathetic strings—like those on a sitar—just past the drones. (For those counting, that brings the chaturangui’s total to 24 strings.)
“Art is not the same everywhere … but if you look at everything in nature, it’s connected. The same air you breathe, I breathe.”
Today, the chaturangui is but one of Bhattacharya’s primary instruments (standing alongside his later slide-instrument inventions, the anandi, gandharvi, and most recently, the pushpa veena). In concert, he and his accompanists operate in a similar way to how he approached the improvisation of “To His Lotus Feet.” He and his daughter Anandi Bhattacharya, a vocalist, and his brother, tabla player Subhasis Bhattacharya, performed music from The Sound of the Soul for audiences at La Folle Journée, a classical music festival in Nantes, France. He says in a performance, as in the studio, the story of the song starts from one point, then slowly develops, involving more characters and building energy before reaching a narrative peak. It gently decrescendos—the sound of “people going back home, leaving.”
Bhattacharya performing live on the pushpa veena, a 25-string slide instrument built from a single piece of teak, plus goat skin, and a deer-horn bridge.
Bhattacharya’s goal with his music is not to be “the best,” or to satisfy some notion of what his music should be. It is simply to communicate and share what he has learned from his teachers, from his whole world of influence and openness. He laments that with music, we’re raised in small pockets of influence, without much access to other musical traditions and appreciations.
Music streaming services have allowed distinct cultures to spread and mingle around the world, but Bhattacharya says we still have a way to go in bridging music traditions. “Art is not the same everywhere … but if you look at everything in nature, it’s connected,” he explains. “The same air you breathe, I breathe. The same water is flowing into the oceans, it’s the same sunlight we’re receiving. Our cultures are only different because we were ignorant about each other.”
But being raised in Calcutta taught Bhattacharya an important lesson: There is no such thing as bad music if it is created intentionally and caringly; all musical practices are connected. “Every music is divine,” he says. When we create music, we are interpreting and exploring the universe: mystery, beauty, fear, joy.
“We are the divine pieces of gods and goddesses,” Bhattacharya continues. “That is why we should accept everything as beautiful, accept it and let it come in our door. That is what I have learned in my 40 years of traveling all over the world. It’s such a beautiful life we can make through accepting other cultures and finding the way in between.”
Uttarpara Sangeet Chakra 2023 Father Son Duet | Raag Madhuvanti | Pdt Debashish Bhattacharya
With astounding virtuosity, Bhattacharya combines Indian classical music and Western slide guitar technique to create a singular, stirring sound.