Friday, March 14, 1996

Styles are relative to the Cousins

By ERROL NAZARETH
Toronto Sun

BOMBAY -- "Indian classical music is not their music and neither is Western pop," a member of a popular Indo-jazz fusion group said recently on Times FM, the only FM station in this bustling metropolis.

If there's one thing that unites India's post-colonial MTV generation with young Indians in the diaspora, it's straddling Eastern and Western cultures.

More often than not, this dance manifests itself in the art and music being made by Indian youth.

Bombay's Colonial Cousins, comprised of multi-instrumentalist Leslie Lewis and singer Hari, is a pithy example.

Both grew up on equal doses of classical Indian music, Hindi film music, the Eagles, Hendrix, and Cream.

Last April, they released their self-titled debut CD and have garnered more international awards than most Canadian groups achieve in a career.

MTV -- yes, they have MTV as well as two other music video channels here -- invited the Cousins to record an Unplugged session in London last June. In September, the group bagged an MTV India Viewers Choice Award in New York.

Two months later, Hong Kong-based music video station Channel V heaped a ton of awards -- including Best Album and Best Producer -- on the group, and last December Billboard flew the two to Las Vegas to accept the magazine's Indian Viewers Choice Award.

Most will credit Lewis and Hari's thoughtful, moody and brilliantly executed fusion of Indian and Western sounds for their success.

Lewis, who personifies modesty, credits fate.

"The two of us were working on a TV jingle in my studio (Purple Haze) and the script hadn't arrived, so I began playing on the guitar and Hari, who's trained in both North and South Indian classical vocal styles, began singing along," recalls Lewis. "I kept switching styles and so did he, and that's very rare for an Indian singer.

"It was magical and we've never been able to recapture that."

After banding together, the two headed to England to record. As fate would have it, they hooked up with ace session musicians Keith LeBlanc, Skip McDonald, and Doug Wimbish, all of whom deeply dug the Cousins' sound.

And by the time the album was recorded, popular Indo-British artists Najma Akhtar and Talvin Singh, Indian slide guitarist and Grammy Award-winner V.M. Bhatt, and guitar god Vernon Reid had also played on it.

Lewis, who calls the Cousins "an English band with an Indian soul," is fond of saying: "We didn't set out to prove anything, we're just doing our thing.

"When you listen to our album what you're hearing is us speaking."

Hopefully the Colonial Cousins' story inspires their contemporaries in the sub-continent to take risks and offer less-cliched fare than I witnessed during my five-week visit.

"Sure, MTV and Channel V have helped nurture the scene," says Lewis. "We didn't have music videos before. If you sang well, that's all that mattered.

"Now, it matters more how you look than how you sing."

PHOTO: MUSICAL MIX ... Colonial Cousins' Hari, left, and Leslie Lewis.

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