Chutney Music...my experiences-IV

In the initial days of listening to Chutney Music and reading web-based articles, I had this great urge to write a scholarly article on this…all kinds of ideas were hopping around in my head…making connections…trying to give it an attractive title and sub-title and a good opening paragraph…and after listening to the D’Bhuyaa Saaj concert, I was enthused and pepped up and made several tentative openings…I wanted to situate Chutney Music in the midst of various India Diaspora musics, the most famous example being the Asian Underground Music scene in England with its mixture of Bhangra, Indian classical, and electronica…and as I was also listening to loads of Asian Underground bands and individual artistes, this was a natural kind of inclination…

But the one issue that caught my attention was the question of identity… and this was triggered off by Ajeet Praimsingh’s comments…we were discussing Chutney Music and then Ajeet Praimsingh related an incident… “yesterday I went to ma hotel room and switched on my TV, maan, and was watching songs…and I see this maan singing on TV…Lotay La… maan…he has taken our song, maan, he was singing our song, maan…” Initially, I did not understand what he said…then it dawned after a couple of seconds… those days, a bhojpuri style song and music video was a rage on TV music channels for a brief while…called ‘Lootela,’ it was a lavish music video in the remix style, done quite well actually with Urmila Matondkar as the focus of attention, and the actors too did their job well and the singer himself, called D' Raja, appeared on the video singing the bhojpuri style song (see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVOo_JgvBng) … I tried to figure out Ajeet Praimsingh’s statement and realised that he was talking about a Chutney song that became a mammoth hit in the 1960s-70s in Trinidad and catapulted the singer Sonny Mann into instant fame…the song was called ‘Lotayla’… (catch the song here, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOcH3NbzupM; though it appears in youtube, there is no video here, only the song sung by Sonny Mann, but this is a later version, sung along with Denis Belfon and General Grant, which is actually a Soca; but you can see the similarities and differences)… and this was what Ajeet Praimsingh was referring to when he said, ‘he has taken our song, maan…’ it sounded amusing then, and then I thought about it and felt that this posed an interesting question… the question of the song’s identity … Whose song is it anyway? Where did the song originate from? Where did it go? Who took it there? Whose song is it now? Who does it belong to?

I am still searching for answers…