While a very few in India would actually know this Kolkata based guitarist and music composer,
Amit Dutta has perhaps transcended from being just a guitarist to an explorer of sounds
and a philosopher amalgamating life and music.
You know what, there are millions of songs from the same twelve notes. How?
He shares his journey with MIG.
What is changing? What is the elastic thing is time.
The time between what we hear is not the notes really.
We hear the time taken from one note to the other note.
Music can have a little bit of a jazzy kind of inflection even though I don't play jazz jazz in that format.
And it could sometimes have some kind of Indian essence even though again I don't play Indian music.
I know nothing about Indian music. It's too deep. I have to start a new life for that.
But I'm kind of able to put together and make one sound which is what I call like a one world sound.
Usually people use sound but I could use this.
It raises the question, is it Indian or what? You know.
Talking about spirituality, I don't associate all the time this spirituality with God.
That spirituality comes from within. Sometimes my favorite time is to look into nothingness.
Just vague out. I mean just look into nothingness.
And that nothingness makes you learn so many. In fact everything lies in that nothingness.
From witnessing Calcutta becoming Kolkata and the gradual death of favorable music scene in the country
to understanding how the world with the advent of internet is cocooned inside your bedroom.
Conversations on the aesthetics of music are rare nowadays.
Why India is a challenging space for pursuing music as work and passion?
Dutta has perhaps the most apt and insightful answers.
I don't think they recognize this subject as a worthy thing to do in life or a dignified job in life, which I have done.
My only mission in life to kind of my right now at this stage of my life is to say or prove that this is a respectable, valid job to do in life.
It's like that, I guess all over the world, but if you have three venues here in New York, there will be a hundred venues.
I mean I'm not talking about just guitar or rock or jazz or anything, it could be anything.
I mean I dream to see a coffee bar with a sit-up player playing.
You know, a bar doesn't always have to be rock and roll.
It could be a bar with a sit-up player, next little bar, there's a coffee thing or whatever it is, there's a guitar player there.
That should be the society.
In real life, it does really help if the external bodies, the structure or the society helps a little bit with venues, with some sponsors, with the practicalities of it.
And how I would like to be, when I hope that people take this seriously, because now what I see in India, it's been too much of a rock star, so I hold a guitar and pose with it.
I don't think everyone has the right to do it.
You know, when you see great players, whether it's a guitar player or a vocalist or an Indian musician or a western guitar player or a flamenco guitar player, whatever it is,
you understand this fineness of this art form called music, you know.
And then those little things of beauty started grabbing me harder and kept me in that beautiful jail, you know.
I was locked up, you know, which I love, you know.
With all the odds, I'm telling you, it's not a beautiful life, it's not like everything fantastic and sunny and butterflies and honey and flowers.
You know, it's very hard. It's in fact black.
Music
You know, when you're 16 to, say, 2021-22, the zeal and the young youth, the young blood, let's do, let's have some fun and all that is there.
But when life looks at you directly in your eye, now this is life, then you quit, you take a job and because this life is different.
So then it goes into the back burner and then after 10 years, you say, oh, I haven't touched the guitar for last 10 years.
There is no real difference between playing music and theory.
You know, theory is just the description of what you are doing or want to do later in life and it's just a description of that.
It always existed. Music exists. Music is that.
And then some people take that information and write it in a book and then it becomes the theory book. There's no real difference.
Like, for example, if I play, say, like an e-major chord.
And then if someone knows from the theory book that, okay, with this, you can add another, like, a colorful note or color note, color tone, really.
To that chord, without really changing the harmonic base of it, they say, okay, what can we add?
They say the ninth note of the scale, which is the second note.
But that sound is already there. I mean, even if you didn't know, it's already there.
It's not because the book says so therefore you can play.
If you have the ear or the commitment, if you commit your life to it, you will soon or later find out that it's always been there.
You know, I didn't have, obviously, net or whatever in the internet.
So information, even though I had teachers here and there, but the serious stuff when I really wanted to go into the depths of it, I had to figure it on my own.
So one little thing like that could take me months or sometimes years.
But now, if I tell my student, here, this is what you can do. He gets it in a second, literally in a second.
But the difference is, he will just hopefully not take it, okay, I can do that and finish.
But you have to understand how it takes to figure that out to spend three years just to figure that little thing out.
You know what I mean?
So there's a romance and a deeper sense of appreciation towards music.
Stories and examples of wisdom fill the ears in the room full of students as he talks about the cliched perceptions in the society
and what inspires him to look forward to this journey through treble and overtones in harmony.
But there's something, for some reason, maybe the energy of all these little beauties that you start seeing keeps you within it.
Even if no one ever hears me ever again, but I will still do this, you know.
And that's the path that I've chosen, but that's the path that I will walk, you know, and I will walk it on my own terms.
Parents don't say, what do you do, even though they haven't told me ever.
In fact, I got so much support from my mom and stuff like that.
What do you do if you play, say, I play guitar? No, no, like what do you do in life? That has to be out.
So the valid thought of equality is going to be really truly effective when people start to think in that sense,
you know, respecting everyone, a beautiful society.
And music, you know, makes you think in very final senses, funny, fine lines between the lines.
So we have too many questions. We ask the society, hey, this is not right.
Sometimes we are pushed around, pushed right. You know, let them not talk because they're asking serious questions.
We will be in trouble.
One little fact that I remember that changed my life forever is when I was 11 or 12 in my old house,
in the big hall rooms, in the living room, there was a guitar on a chair like this, kept like this.
Old Hawaiian guitar and it hardly had strings. I think it had just two or three strings missing,
but it definitely had the fourth string on, I remember.
And I crawled. I was just kind of playing around on the floor and I crawled and I did this.
And I still remember the feeling on my tip of my finger.
And that's why somewhere zapped in my head and he said, this is what I want to do.
You know, I still carry that feeling. I don't know if I can express it, but I still know the touch and what it felt like.
And I remember it was warped. The guitar didn't sound too good and the fourth string, the buzz and the overtone of the fourth string,
still I can hear it and that changed my life forever.
