A part of innumerable concerts worldwide and ten international music albums, Niladri, who is just out with his new Saregama album Priority, believes that music is meant to “touch the soul of the listener and aspire for a fine harmony between tradition and modernity that is in sync with the sensibilities of a global audience”.

This traditional Indian classical musician has a taste for different forms of music enhanced by his working with men like Taufiq Qureshi, Sivamani, Louis Banks, Ranjit Barot and Shankar Mahadevan. Niladri began learning music when he was four and two years later, he performed at the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry.
His special instrument, the zitar, says Niladri, was initially devised for convenience as a travelling sitar by Rikhi Ram Ajay. It was then modified into an electric 5-string instrument by Niladri himself. “I was experimenting along electric lines. I modified it to 5 strings and put in an electric pick-up to amplify the sound. The zitar as it stands today cannot get smaller in size or produce larger than the volume it does.”

Both sitar and zitar are also a part of Niladri's latest album, Priority, which is a mix of musical genres and both vocal and instrumental tracks. Rattan Mohan Sharma, Sanjeev Abhyankar, Dominique Cerejo and June Banerjee are the singers in the former.

“I began working on Priority in 2003 and composed the first track with the zitar,” says Niladri. “But I also tried out this lead track on the people at a live performance. So for almost five years, I kept improvising the tracks and adding elements from rock to electronic to lounge. The pieces came inspired by a theme, but some were connected with a theme after I composed them. And I decided that some of the tracks should also have vocal elements to connect better.”

The album, incidentally, has been released as Zitar in the USA through Sony, and Niladri and his music company Saregama launched it at a college festival in Mumbai because, as the musician puts it, “The youth like my brand of fusion, which comes from a knowledge of both Indian and Western music, unlike most of fusion today.”

Since Niladri blends the best of the old and the new, he uses both the instruments - the sitar for his traditional, classical concerts and the zitar for the world or fusion concerts.
And like so many classical talents, Niladri uses his skills a lot in film music. Among the films for which he has played one or both of his instrument are Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy’s Bunty Aur Babli and Pritam’s Life In A...Metro, Gangster and Dhoom:2 and also some films with A.R.Rahman.

How does it work then - composing classical and fusion and yet also playing for a popular format like a film song, especially since classical musicians tend to look down on the melting-pot nature of film music?

“Frankly, not everyone can do it, because playing for films needs a certain sensibility and mindset,” says Niladri. “And I do not mean a psychological mindset but a musical one. But at the same time, you can see that so many classical maestros have always played for films, including Pt. Shivkumar Sharma, Pt.Hariprasad Chaurasia and many more. But then filmmakers like V.Shantaram and K.Asif always wanted the best. It is well-known that Bade Ghulam Ali Khan was paid a then-unprecedented one lakh rupees for singing in K.Asif’s Mughal-E-Azam.”
But does he face hiccups when he has to work with music directors who may themselves lack a knowledge of the instrument and of classical music in general?

“That’s a very good question!” he muses. “ But in that sense, I was very lucky to start around 1988-’89 with Laxmikant-Pyarelal, with whom work was a learning process for me. They also had the cream of musicians working for them, including my father, and were thoroughly knowledgeable about everything. Besides, those were the days of live recordings. Today, with the track-recording system, I cannot even tell you which songs I have played on in so many cases!”