Multi-talented duo to 'create vibrations of joy' in Monroe's

Cork based outfit Bangsambra, made up of Rajinder Singh and Tonynho Dos Santos, will play Monroe’s Live on Friday next, November 4.

The two combine their voices with an array of instruments, including bass, guitar, trumpet and several types of drums.

Raj originally hails from India, but has been living in Cork for more than seven years. He explains that the southern city’s thriving music scene first brought him and Brazilian-born Tonyhno together.

“We met at a charity gig and we were both performing,” Raj recalls. “I was in a sort of African percussion group and Tonynho was doing his doing his own style of Brazilian funk/new jazz. He was looking for someone to join him on one or two songs. When he invited somebody to join him, none of them got up. I got up and jammed with him for a couple of songs.

“After that, we just kept on bumping into each other,” he adds. “To the point when we were [individually] looking for a house, we turned up for two of the same houses, at the same time. And we ended up living on the same road. So I said to him ‘look there’s something going on here, this is not normal!’.”

Although they grew up thousands of miles from each other, Raj and Tonynho – who worked in the music business in Germany for 15 years before moving to Cork – quickly established a musical connection.

“He didn’t say to me ‘this is what I’m playing and these are the rhythms, learn these’,” says Raj.

“He said ‘see what your feeling is, and put it on top’. That’s how it started. We were very much coming from different places, but we weren’t thinking about either of them.

“He wasn’t looking for me to play Brazilian or Latin rhythms, and I wasn’t looking for him to do Indian style. But we found a middle ground. We didn’t try and change each other, if you like.”

Bangsambra have recently released their debut album, 2012. Raj feels it’s a good representation of the duo’s willingness to fuse Middle Eastern, Brazilian, African and Indian rhythms.

“Some of it, if you put it on paper, it shouldn’t work,” he muses, “because of the sense of timing, the academics of it . . . They shouldn’t really work but they do.”

Tonynho is a keen admirer of Miles Davis, and there is a strong current of jazz in Bangsambra’s sound. As with Davis’ music, improvisation is an important part of how they write.

“We started to create something, and before we knew it we realised we had a whole composition. For the most part, we hold on to the main theme of the composition, but we try and explore it a bit more each time we play live. If a song gets more creative, we go with it.”Tonynho studied music at the University of Salvador de Bahia, but Raj is largely self-taught.

“I come from a very different background in that respect,” he says. “Even though I did attend some academic aspects of music, my interest isn’t there. My interest is coming from the feeling of the voice; I’m listening to what sounds right, what flows, as opposed to getting caught up in the academic side of it. Because if I did . . . some of the African stuff, or the Middle Eastern, the Indian, or the Latin . . . I probably wouldn’t explore it. I would box myself in and, as a result, you wouldn’t get anywhere with it.”

As Raj says, his voice is the jumping-off point when it comes to exploring his craft.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.