debashish bhattacharya wins bbc award for world music

the bbc has awards they give each year for outstanding album recordings from various parts of the world. they give one awards per continent, in addition to awards for best newcomer, culture-crossing and alike that are a toss-up for the entire world. that’s a ton of music, so i’d imagine competition is pretty tight… nonetheless, this year, debashish bhattacharya won best album in asia/pacific.

“As a boy, Debashish learned western guitar as well as sitar, but his most rigorous training was a ten-year stint during his twenties studying with Pandit Brij Bhushan Kabra, the great pioneer of Indian raga slide guitar. It was during this time that he realised his vocation would be ‘to serve as a bridge between raga’s past and future’.”

“Now 43, and officially a Pandit (master musician) since turning 40, he is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest slide guitarists, and has invented his own ‘Trinity of Guitars’. His Chaturangi has 22 strings, which enable it to suggest the timbres of violin, sitar, sarod and veena. The Ghandarvi is a 14-stinged guitar that can sound like a veena, sarangi, saz or flamenco guitar, and the tiny 4-stringed Anandi is basically a slide ukulele. He also has his own three-fingered style of playing which gives him an edge over others when it comes to speed and dexterity, and in 2003, he established a music school in his hometown of Kolkata.” from bbc radio 3