BENGALURU: Firsts are always special and city-based pianist, Aman Mahajan, felt nothing less than butterflies in his stomach when his first solo album, Refuge, was launched on Wednesday. The album is on all major platforms like Apple music, Spotify and more.
Mahajan, who is known for his piano-jazz style of music, says he can’t put the album in any particular genre. It is like his “music scrapbook”, which contains 10 compositions that he had put together over a period of time. The music holds distinct traces of jazz, Indian folk and classical music, European classical traditions, Japanese and East Asian aesthetics, West African and folk music from around the world. The compositions also feature instruments as diverse as the saxophone, tabla, duduk, bamboo flute, electric and acoustic bass, etc. “The album is my musical journey. I had saved all my compositions which I had composed and were influenced by composers I had performed with or different genres of musicians I collaborated with,” says Mahajan, who took almost 14 years to put together the whole album.
Mahajan started learning western classical in Hyderabad when he was four years old. At the age of 16, he started playing with many musicians which made him improvise on his music. He went to Berklee College of Music to study electronic music. He was introduced to different genres of music there, but he particularly took interest in jazz.
According to him, it has not been easy being a pianist in a country like ours. “I play contemporary improvised music, and when I started off, it was difficult to find musicians to collaborate with for my kind of music. It is also equally challenging to find a venue which has a piano. But things are changing now, with more musicians open to collaborating with piano,” says Mahajan, who has worked with popular artistes including Berlin-based guitarist Nishad Pandey, Austrian musicians Patrick Dunst (saxophones) and Grilli Pollheimer (drums and percussion), and Bengaluru-based singer-songwriter Radha Thomas and Lucky Ali’s band.
