In 1996, a 19-year-old Israeli music student witnessed the Indian classical music heavyweights Hariprasad Chaurasia and Zakir Hussain performing in Jerusalem. He didn’t understand a word, but his response was physical. He decided to travel to India to arrive closer to its source, fell in love with and married the daughter of a Sufi sheikh in Ajmer, and made the country his home for more than a decade. Shye Ben Tzur’s journey since has aligned with the tenets of Sufism. Often at odds with orthodoxy, this branch of Islam looks at the relationship between the divine and the self through the lens of surrender, to the point where one’s own identity dissolves.
Throughout Ranjha, Ben Tzur’s latest album with Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, the blurring of selves is the goal. We are reminded of this tenet multiple times in the chorus of the title track, sung by Ben Tzur and the qawwali singers of the Rajasthan Express, who borrow verses of the 18th-century Punjabi poet Bulleh Shah: “Ranjha Ranjha kardi hun main aape Ranjha hoi/Saddo mainu Dhido Ranjha, Heer na aakho koi” (“Repeating Ranjha’s name, I myself have become Ranjha/Call me Dhido Ranjha now, do not call me Heer anymore”). Dhido Ranjha, a wandering flute player, and Heer, a wealthy woman, are the protagonists of a tragic Punjabi folk tale: Bulleh Shah transposes the framework of the lover and beloved to the self and the divine. Nathu Lal Solanki strikes the nagara, a form of kettledrum, and the elongated repetition of the word “Ranjha” accumulates layers, aiming for a trance-like state. Ben Tzur understands the spiritual kernel of this process, having studied under Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar in the ancient dhrupad tradition, where rhythmic Vedic chants achieve a similar effect.
To create Ranjha, Ben Tzur worked with the same team as 2015’s Junun, with the addition of the Smile’s Tom Skinner on drums. They recorded in Greenwood’s studio in Oxford—a stark contrast to the hot, dusty room where they made Junun in the 15th-century Mehrangarh Fort with intermittent power supply. The vocals breathe easy, and Skinner’s touch is light. He avoids emphatic downbeats; the cymbal work is more about texture than rhythm. On Junun, percussion often dissolved into the fort’s ambient resonance. On Ranjha, Skinner’s kit has more spatial definition, and the playing is tighter and more tactile.
As with Junun, Hebrew, Urdu, and Hindi coalesce, as does Greenwood’s keyboard and bass guitar with the Rajasthan Express’ trumpets, harmonium, and dholaks. Nearly all the tracks are rigorously plotted within the modal grammar of Hindustani classical music. In “Ishq-E-Majnun,” Rajendra Prasanna’s piercing shehnai, traditionally used in Indian weddings when the bride departs, locks tightly with Greenwood’s bass. Aamir Bhiyani’s trumpet enters only halfway through, occupying a higher frequency range to cut through the dense percussive spiral. Greenwood is conscious not to interfere with Ben Tzur’s arrangements by, in his own words, “imposing western chords on them, like you’re forcing a square into a circle.” This approach works best in “Shemesh,” where the interplay between Jyotsna Srikanth’s violin and the esraj—played by one of its most popular exponents, Kirpal Singh Panesar—bridges the worlds of the Western chamber piece and a Sufi qawwali.
The trumpet is a mainstay of the desert state of Rajasthan, played at weddings and processions. In Ranjha, there is very little of the bebop agility that Bhiyani displayed on nearly every track in Junun. In “Saqi,” the trumpet signals a resolution after the electronic groundwork of synth and bass. In “Saqi” and “Sharminda,” the electronics complement the qawwali chorus, but in “Aviv” and “Marbolot,” the tension between devotional repetition and electronic suspension feels less like trance and more like stasis. This might be due to the suggestion of a motorik beat—itself a trance engine—which clashes with the qawwali repetition. Both are circling the same effect from different ends, and neither can fully transcend. And yet, throughout Ranjha, the qawwali singers of the Rajasthan Express form the record’s emotional core: Once you give in to their performance, it’s hard to focus on anything else.
