DOMINO
In which this trio of Fife-based folk singer-songwriter James Yorkston, jazz-leaning double bassist Jon Thorne and Delhi devotional singer and sarangi maestro Suhail Yusuf Khan burrow ever-deeper into an Anglo-Scottish-Indian fusion of their own making. If Sarathy Korwar’s superb 2019 album More Arriving was an up-to-date cultural exchange between India and the West, then these three are winding the clock back to our roots with this set of exploratory songs inspired by the nine (nava) emotions (rasa) of the arts. More plaintive than their previous two albums, Khan’s presence looms largest here, as the words of Robert Burns and centuries-old British ballads are folded into the still more ancient sound of Punjabi-language qawwali devotionals, the pulses and cycles of Hindustani classical music and Khan’s see-sawing sarangi playing.