Reviving The Orient Express: Continuing Monojit Datta’s Latin music legacy

Frankly, all of us who have come back to revive the band have had two sets of parents. One is definitely our biological parents, and the other has been Kochuda and Amyt Datta. The house where we got our talim (training) — now when we look back at it, it feels like a movie. Dwaipayan, Sourav and I go all the way back to South Point High School. We didn’t initially realize that Kochuda was planning to create a band with kids fresh out of high school. Imagine the patience he had! So, from that point of view, tell me, if you had a chance to relive your childhood with no agenda in mind but to experience the bliss in music, as Kochuda would say—that’s what all of us are trying to revisit now as a band. There are three percussionists in the band, and none of them sound the same. I think that is the success of a true guru. Kochuda taught us not only music but also life. The realisation sets in now, 25 years later, and after 7 years since he left us. At that point, he was the all-in-all of the band, and all of us had moved away from Kochuda within the first 4-5 years of our careers. Now that we’re coming back together, we have changed as people, but we’ve carried music within us the entire time.

When kids around me were learning how to play Summer of ’69, I was busy listening to Xavier Cugat. Side by side, I was also learning Carnatic classical. So, I play bass and write lyrics. There are no challenges, really. If you love what you’re doing, you won’t be able to view it as a challenge. It’s rewarding, if anything.

The inspiration was a woman. I react to anything by writing a composition, so I did that. But I have also seen Kochuda mix Bangla with Latin music. That’s how I knew this composition was going to come together very well. I knew this song demanded an old-school heavier voice, and Ivy is one of the handful of people I really like in the industry. It was a cumulative effort, basically. Matt Keegan was a choice because Afro-Cuban music has a lot of wind sections. I needed someone who would understand that we are playing a song that is a lounge-ish adaptation of Afro-Cuban music, but one that also has light classical or thumri elements. We didn’t ask him to do anything specific; he figured it out himself. He knew harmonium goes with this sort of music, which is a blow-chord instrument. So, in replacement of the harmonium, he played the soprano, baritone, and tenor saxophones. The challenge was to maintain the integrity of all the participating artists and create a new holistic meaning.

The Orient Express album that we had planned consisted of eight songs. But now, we are releasing them as eight singles. There are four languages—instrumental, Hindi, English, and Bengali. Loner and Blue are two singles that are tributes to Kochuda. Both were his composed instrumental tracks, to which Dwaipayan and I have written the lyrics.

I have waited 25 years to play this music, so I am going to go all out. The sky’s the limit. We will keep playing, we will keep writing, we will keep revisiting older compositions.