SHYE BEN TZUR, JONNY GREENWOOD AND THE RAJASTHAN EXPRESS TAKE US INSIDE THE MAKING OF ‘RANJHA’

THE AJMER/JAFFA-BASED INDIAN CLASSICALLY-TRAINED ARTIST REUNITED WITH THE ACCLAIMED COMPOSER, PRODUCER AND MULTI-INSTRUMENTALIST KNOWN FOR HIS WORK WITH RADIOHEAD AND THE SMILE, AND TOOK RAJASTHANI ARTISTS TO OXFORDSHIRE FOR RECORDING.

- By ANURAG TAGAT

Back in 2015, India-based Israeli-American artist Shye Ben Tzur, along with Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood (also an Oscar-nominated composer and part of the band The Smile) and folk group The Rajasthan Express created Junun, a cross-cultural collaboration that won acclaim for its haunting fusion of Rajasthani folk, qawwali and experimental music and helped introduce Indian musical traditions to a global audience beyond the usual world music circuit.

A decade later, their second album together – Ranjha – is still slowly permeating the world, and Ben Tzur hopes that the psychedelic, brass-infused, Rajasthani folk-meets-grooves full-length, comprising 11 tracks in Hindi, Urdu and Hebrew, especially strikes a chord with Indian listeners. “I feel that people outside of India, they enjoy it and they love it for whatever it is, and for the music of it, but in India, people can really understand the subtleties, the poetries – they can understand the culture in a very direct way, and I feel that kind of a bond is something that I really hope for this album to be able to kind of reach out,” he tells Rolling Stone India over a video call from Jaffa, Tel Aviv.

Splitting his time between Ajmer and Jaffa, Ben Tzur declares that Ranjha “came from India” even though it was recorded at Greenwood’s Oxfordshire studio in the U.K. That’s a stark difference from Junun, which was created in a few weeks at Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur.

The bandleader says that there was no real pressure to try and “match up” to the internationally lauded Junun when they began working on