World music comes to Parel

Italian guitars

The genre of global Fusion music is increasingly popular in Mumbai. As a part of the Global Music Festival in Blue Frog, Kefaya, an international collective of musicians founded and led by Italian guitarist, Giuliano Modarelli and British pianist, Al MacSween will perform live. The band explores world Folk traditions through improvisation, live electronics and contemporary grooves.

Italian guitarist Giuliano Modarelli and British pianist Al MacSween

Their music bears influences from across Europe, India and Africa to the Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East. "We started as a collective of musicians based in London, coming from all over the world with the desire to explore new ways of creating music, combining our individual cultural and musical background as well as sharing a common desire to promote ideas of equality and internationalism," says Giuliano Modarelli the band's co-founder.

The highlight of its sound is its understanding of different musical languages and that it emerges from the collective's extensive global collaborations, including with Cuban jazz pioneer Omar Puente, Flamenco singer Chico Perez, tabla maestro Bickram Ghosh, Palestinian oud virtuoso Ahmed Eriqat and many others.

Over the past few years, Kefaya has been collaborating with many Indian artistes, including Shankar Mahadevan, Bickram Ghosh, Purbayan Chaterjee, Niladri Kumar, Shankar Tucker, Paban Das Baul, Pete Lockett and Talvin Singh. In India, it will be performing materials from its soon-to-be-released debut album, Radio International, and continuing collaborations with Indian artistes. The album deals with issues like struggle for equality and liberation, stories of migration, tales of musical encounters and sounds of resistance. "Indian audiences are musically open and hungry for new sounds, so we expect it to be fun," Modarelli tells us.