Mathures Paul

Anthony LoGerfo has achieved at a young age what most drummers dream of during their lifetime. After working with Gwen Stefani, he is busy recording for Eliana Burki’s next album. Mathures Paul met him backstage Drummers can make concerts a roaring success or be responsible for poor reviews. At a very young age Anthony LoGerfo has set high standards, those demanded by rock stars; he has every element that goes into the making of another Ginger Baker, Brian Blade, Matt Brann or Matt Helders. Anyway, he’s almost there, courtesy Gwen Stefani on whose two albums ~ Love. Angel. Music. Baby. and The Sweet Escape ~ he has drummed like a man possessed by a passion. Not just Stefani, he is also the drummer for renowned Alpine horn player Eliana Burki and Elan Attias of The Wailers. Being part of a group, one tends to get lost while touring and the vocalist steals the limelight. LoGerfo thrilled critics, promising that better music is on the way. His association with Gwen Stefani was purely acci...

DJ Sanj doesn’t fail to pump up the volume on his latest album, Bollywood Punk, writes Mathures Paul The British R&B act Rouge, comprising, Laura Ismail (Egypt), Legha Joseph (Iran) and Amrita Hunjan (India), in the last few years has made rapid progress towards the top of European music charts, giving us the hit Don’t Be Shy, and is now working on their second album with Timbaland. Though the J-Nas mix of the track is enjoying considerable success, few know that he is also known as DJ Sanj, one of the more popular names among Indian artistes living abroad. As DJ Sanj, he likes to stick to funky Bollywood numbers and J-Nas is the more glamorous side. The DJ/producer, a trendsetter in the ‘desi’ music scene, is not always satisfied spinning remixes of popular Hindi film numbers, making him look for something more. Always on the move, especially across North America, Sanj is currently based in Mumbai providing thumping R&B and club beats for Indian discotheques, besides promoting...

Hanging around studio doors made Albert Moses a determined actor, one who wasn’t scared of crashing a tricycle carrying James Bond Roger Moore into props. The Mind Your Language star was born to be an entertainer and he’s not giving up, writes Mathures Paul The “half-wit” Ranjeet Singh brushed up his English well enough in Mind Your Language to land roles in two James Bond films ~ bartender in The Spy Who Loved Me and Sadruddin in Octopussy. Mind Your Language was the opening chapter in the career of Albert Moses, aka Ranjeet Singh, who went on to star in numerous critically-appreciated films and television shows ~ The Man Who Would Be King, The Great Quest, An American Warewolf in London, Jungle Book II, East Is East. Watching good friends from the sets of Mind Your Language disappear, some into oblivion and losing a few to death, Moses trudged along to endear himself to audiences all over the world. The “Indian Gable” (as he was promoted after arriving in England) continues to be a b...

Diwali shopping is incomplete without a visit to environs surrounding Cotton Street. You don’t need to stroll down a maze of lanes because people are always there to push you wherever, writes Mathures Paul In Chitpur each lane has its own unique blend of personality. The spectrum comprises the flamboyant to the demure, the ideal to the repellent. And the people somehow manage to fit together, selling wares over chit chat. The photographer stood helpless, outnumbered, before the different varieties of ladoo, aloo dum, samosa, kachodi… thinking which to click, which to eat. As Diwali closes in, the bustle reaches a feverish pitch on the lanes hemming in Cotton Street. The festival of lights is more than bursting a few firecrackers. Here shopping means a little more than buying a sari or two. Chitpur needs to be divided into bits and pieces to get a rough idea about what goes on inside these narrow lanes. If historic buildings is your interest, there are a plenty for your eyes. Instead, U...

Photograph from the Internet Former Goethals Memorial School students relive Billy Bunter days as the institute’s centenary celebrations begin, writes Mathures Paul Over the years you meet a lot of people. Some of them stick with you through thick and thin, some weave their way through your life and disappear but some earn a permanent place in your heart ~ your school friends. You don't need to study in your parent's school to understand the meaning of reunions, and the generation gap between two individuals is forgotten when they find out they are from the same school. In the course of the last 100 years, Goethals Memorial School has given birth to Olympians, scientists, actors, teachers and, most importantly, honest citizens. Established in 1907, the school begins its centenary celebrations. This is probably the only Indian boarding school to have produced three Olympic gold medallists ~ Joseph T Galibardy (Berlin, 1936), Cyril J Mitchie (Berlin, 1936) and Chaman Sing Gurung ...

Photographs: Indranil Paul A lot can be learnt from a 78-year-old scientist who just refuses to fade like the stars, writes Mathures Paul Stars fade but Professor Amalendu Bandyopadhyay’s interest in them remains undiminished. With a small suitcase filled with a telescope and slides, he has travelled to every corner of India to give lessons in astronomy, to dispel misconceptions and put astrology in its right place. A senior scientist at the MP Birla Institute of Fundamental Research, MP Birla Planetarium, Kolkata, he has been instrumental in introducing the postgraduate diploma course in Astronomy and Planetarium Sciences and can, in a few simple words, explain the complex movements of planets and stars (as readers of this newspaper will have have realised from his regular and exclusive contributions to these columns). The 78-year-old Bandyopadhyay has visited remote corners of the country to explain astronomical concepts to children — an activity that has won him accolades from the s...

Music is all about life, of the paths we travel every day. Before a splash, Lou Majaw speaks to Mathures Paul about the music scene in North-east India It was beauty of the rains that inspired The Great Society to compose April Showers. The melody lingers on long after a meeting with Lou Majaw, one of Bob Dylan's most ardent fans. “April Showers transcends time and can be played throughout monsoon. The Great Society composed it on my birthday. The song is an ode to monsoon," says Majaw, whose visits to Kolkata has dwindled over the years. An Ace of Spades concert (featuring Lou, Arjun Sen and Nondan Bagchi) at Someplace Else at The Park brought him to Kolkata, the city where he first heard Dylan, the city where he began his career. Born into a poor family, Majaw and Shillong are synonymous. Every aspiring musician in Shillong knows him, has spoken to him sometime or the other on a street like Upland Road. The beauty of Shillong, the ageless Jacob's Ladder or the Laban hill...

The Other Side Of Dawn inspired a new generation of Indian singers. After having won a million hearts with original songs, Gary Lawyer is set to release a compilation. Is this a new chapter in the singer’s career, asks Mathures Paul The past is untouchable, out of reach. Yet every time he puts on that old jacket, wiggles into a pair blue jeans and hums those lines, somehow you lose sense of time to relive the best years of your life. Here's one singer who could have lived in America to make pots of money. He decided against it. On the hindsight, a wise decision, for without Lawyer a chapter in Western music in India would have been missing. A home loving man, Lawyer is not the kind of person who shows off the rock star hidden inside. He is content to be himself. Posters were up in Kolkata that Gary Lawyer was flying down to play at Park Hotel's Someplace Else, the home of quality English music. After dialling a few numbers, an appointment is made and we meet at the hotel's ...

Harsha Bhogle shifts focus from cricket to travelling. A new show on BBC World News takes him across India. On the run he meets Mathures Paul Taking a break from cricket, Harsha Bhogle recently travelled across India to shoot for a six-part travel show ~ Travel India ~ with a difference for BBC World News. He met strangers, whose lifestyle he had no clue about, whose language he could barely understand. Bhogle started his journey from the desolate Rann of Kutch in Gujarat and then made his way to Bikaner. Moving on, he reached the Golden Temple in Amritsar before travelling to Kashmir where visited Wagah. Moving to a different part of India, he visited Delhi and the holy city of Benares. Without stopping, he headed towards Bihar and then to West Bengal to meet the tribes of the Sunderbans, before travelling to Hyderabad and Nashik (to take a crash course in winemaking). Harsha Bhogle speaks to The Statesman. This is the first time you are hosting a travel show, a pleasant break from cr...

Sushmita Sen finds out cricketers can dance and they are talented enough to land roles in Bollywood. Over to Mathures Paul Wasim Akram came through as a thorough gentleman on Ek Khiladi Ek Hasina, the popular dance reality show on Colors. The show brings together two of India’s biggest passions ~ cricket and glamour, besides showcasing another side to Wasim Akram and Sushmita Sen, the judges. The show features Sreesanth (with Surveen Chawla), Harbhajan (with Mona Singh), Irfan Pathan (with Ashima Bhalla), Dinesh Karthik (with Nigar Khan), Nikhil Chopra (with Barkha Bisht) and Vinod Kambli (with Shama Sikander). Sushmita Sen speaks to The Statesman. Dance and cricket don’t go hand in hand. Having been in the industry for long, how difficult is it for individuals with two left feet to pick up dance steps? It’s hardly ever about getting the steps right. It’s more about the pressure one puts on his/her eyes watching somebody dance; it makes one petrified about dancing. The instant one lear...

Scare your boss or impress your juniors with mobile phone charging units that are not dependent on electricity This is possibly the coolest gadget of 2008, a gizmo that could easily become the talk of the town. For owners of certain mobile phones, it’s time to trade in brick-like chargers for wire-free options! WildCharge Inc presents an option to recharge Apple iPhone, iPod Touch and Blackberry Pearl and 8800 without any wires. Sounds too good to be true? Not quite. On ordering a WildCharger customers receive a mat with a few shiny chrome stripes, the heart of the charging unit. The flat charging pad delivers up to 15 Watts of power, capable of simultaneously charging up to four small devices, such as cellular phones, portable music players and other similar electronic devices. Here’s how it works. Equip the mobile device with a WildCharge Skin and place it on the conductive surface, at any orientation. The WildCharger Pad can simultaneously charge multiple devices as long as they are...

Contrary to popular perception, arranged marriages have a fraction of the divorce rate of conventional love matches. Reva Seth tries to make sense of the institution called marriage in Asian communities in her book First Comes Marriage. Over to Mathures Paul Finding Mr Right is easy if one is a believer in arranged marriages. Find a person and then fall in love! In India there has been a shift from arranged marriages to love at first sight, forcing most of us to believe that the trend in London or New York’s Indian community is similar. Not quite. Second generation Asians are tending towards “arranged introductions”, a compromise between the two. Trying to understand this philosophy is Reva Seth, author of First Comes Marriage. Seth was eight when she first became interested in the subject of arranged marriages; after realising that her parents, unlike those of her friends or the people she saw on TV, had never actually dated. Like most of our parents, they had met twice before tying t...

Photograph: Rajib De Rude shock greets former RAF man in city, writes Mathures Paul Decades of indifferent and incompetent rule have robbed Kolkata of its past grandeur, leaving most hanging on to memories and a rude shock greets those returning after more than half a century. With an eye on a scrapbook of memories, and a box of Navy Flake Smoking Tobacco, Mr AW Holden tried to understand what went wrong since 1946 and whether any of his familiar places remain. The former RAF man spent his salad days in India, facing numerous problems, but the period between 1942 and 1946 remains his glory years. The 88-year-old is travelling across India ~ Calcutta, Shillong, Delhi ~ to find old acquaintances and pay homage to a few of his friends buried at Bhowanipore Cemetery. In his scrapbook ~ a well maintained diary ~ are photographs of RAF aircraft landing on Red Road, Kolkata’s thoroughfare, and friends celebrating here and there. A menu card from Firpo’s, dating back to 8 December 1942, made M...

Miss X released two numbers ~ S-E-X and Christine ~ both banned by the BBC in 1963. Who was she? The better known record dealers in Kolkata’s Wellington area always suggest Miss X. Well, the 45 rpm doesn’t come in a sleeve and contains no information about the singer or the pianist. The two tracks on the vinyl are S-E-X and Christine, both numbers reminding one of records like Music for Making Love, etc. All you would gather from the label are the record company’s name and year of release ~ Ember (S175) and 1963. This is the same decade when Pepe Jaramillo was going strong and his LPs flooded the market. The pianist heard on Christine sounds quite alike Jaramillo. Years of searching has finally provided a result. Miss X was the nom de guerre of actress Joyce Blair, sister of Lionel Blair. Christine was banned by the BBC because authorities thought it referred to the John Profumo/ Stephen Ward case. This 45 rpm is available on the Internet for not less than 10 pounds and in makeshift sh...

Photographs courtesy: Ray Flight Did Kal Kahn come up with this phrase, asks Mathures Paul English people sleeping in the sun to get a tan, Pouring oil upon their faces like a frying pan, Funny thing about it is they all go rosy red, Next day when the peeling starts they're crying in their beds... A person by the name Kal Kahn murdered the English language, thought the British, when he sang Oh to be in England and Ladies of Calcutta. That 45 rpm brings back loads of memories, especially of those unforgettable music sessions that preceded Sunday brunches, followed by Musical Bandbox on All India Radio. Every week there would be one request for either of these Kal Kahn numbers. Whether he gave birth to the phrase "ladies of Calcutta" remains a mystery but he surely made it famous. Making the album an endearing one is its sleeve, completely white. Water logging over the years has robbed many vinyls of their sleeves. Thus it became somewhat of a quest to find out who this Kal...

Keeping Americans in the know about which wine goes best with veal or other expensive preparations is Kolkata-born Rajat Parr. The master sommelier and wine director of world-famous Mina Group bends elbows with Mathures Paul There was a time when good wine flowed primarily in the confines of elite Kolkata clubs. Yes, that’s true. Though we hear of wine appreciation sessions being held in the city from time to time, moving back a decade or two, this was but a figment of the imagination, a passage from a book, pictures displayed on a few television channels... Wine connoisseurs were few and far between and those in the know belonged to, till now, long forgotten clubs. Rajat Parr never expected to be a master sommelier, let alone rub shoulders with Larry Stone at Rubicon. He was too busy building a career. But he struck with a dream at the back of his head. Today, the Kolkata-born Parr is wine director of Mina Group and its signature restaurant, Michael Mina. Michael Bauer, restaurant cri...

Raghu Dixit has proved that folk-rock numbers have a market outside Bollywood and can be sung in a pub, like he did in Kolkata. Over to Mathures Paul The arrangement for any Raghu Dixit composition is quite tight, making it impossible for any instrument to be left out, especially the violin that lends his songs an element of pathos. You are taken away from bustling city scenes to paddy fields caressed by a gentle breeze or sand dunes on which a group of folk musicians play. The arrival of Dixit (combined with Avial) marks another (after AR Rahman) beginning to an era of south Indian musicians setting new standards, only this time it’s not in the sphere of Bollywood. The eastern region with Rupam Islam, Skinny Alley and Neel Dutt is also stealing the spotlight from musicians settled in Mumbai or Delhi. Raghu Dixit Project has been around for years but Kolkata hasn’t heard them, primarily because labels have refused to market folk-rock and Dixit was never interested in “filmy” music. It ...

Language may not be a barrier when it comes to appreciating music but a mountain-high obstacle while interacting with musicians. Before calling on Shamur, Unplugged took the sentence “They just know English and Italian” (mentioned on the invitation) at its face value. Once the group’s members were on the other side of a phone, it was crying time! But the thought of listening to their album, Shardana, kept us going. Usually we speak highly of musicians living in Paris, for they get the opportunity to interact with artistes from across the globe. Italy is not way down the list. Music here is vibrant and highly influenced by American artistes and for DJs this is the place to be. Shamur boasts of a great combination ~ Italian producers Alessandro “Kortezman” Murru and Emanuele Marascia, and vocals provided by Teresa Solinas “Terry”. Shamur presents Shardana on DSE Records, (Universal Music in India). In 2005 the group came up with a song that was a hit on every radio station (and it was a ...

Some dogs, forgive the implication, take after their masters in terms of looks and behaviour, a fact evident in Roadside Romeo, a Yash Raj Films and Walt Disney Pictures presentation, to be released on 24 October. The story of three dogs ~ Romeo, Laila and Charlie Anna ~ has been narrated by Saif Ali Khan, Kareena Kapoor and Jaaved Jaaferi. In terms of looks and body movements, the three animated characters bear close resemblance to the voice artistes. Unlike most animated features India has produced, this one has top notch artwork, good voice modulation and great music, thanks to Salim-Sulaiman. Director Jugal Hansraj should be looking at a hit this Diwali. Salim Merchant speaks to The Statesman. First, the story. Romeo is a “cool dude” living in a mansion, goes around in expensive cars and is considered by most somewhat of a “man” about town. Nothing could go wrong... well, almost. The family that owns him decides to relocates, abandoning Romeo on the mean streets of Mumbai. He is fo...

Location-based social search is no longer a theme for Hollywood films, writes Mathures Paul Coffee prepared with condensed milk is best served in Bangkok, egg yolks prepared with jam is a must-have in Macau, kati roll can only be enjoyed at Nizam’s... While travelling we have difficulty in finding restaurants or markets that fit our budget and for tourist guides we are easy targets. Imagining a world without these nagging problems is impossible but there are ways to make journeys comfortable, like logging on to Fire Eagle (and sites supported by it) or giving Mozilla Geode a try. First, an explanation of the concept. Let’s visit Rummble (in April 2008 the service went into limited open Beta), which is as addictive as FaceBook. The location-based social search and discovery tool allows users to “recommend content for a location”. Simply sign-up with a valid e-mail address and keep “rummbling”, that is, tag places near your house or office, your favourite hangouts, movie halls or restaur...

Shaheen Sheik’s new album forces listeners to think and provokes discussion, writes Mathures Paul With her sultry vocals and soulful lyrics, it’s only a matter of time before Shaheen Sheik finds herself being compared to Natalie Imbruglia and the likes. The success of Rock Candy only fired her creativity to record rEvolution. Shaheen Sheik’s music is full of mystery. The state of mind you were in when work on rEvolution started… In terms of what I wanted to achieve on this album, my ultimate goal was to most honestly express who I am and the place I’ve come to through my life experiences. Some producers call it “finding your sound.” That is why I opted to work on my own for this album and to self-produce it. I wanted no creative filters between my brain, my ears and my talents and the recordings I came up with. Normally I have another producer with me and other musicians, but this time, everything was ‘me’, aside from the guest musicians who graciously added some creative icing. In ter...