raw like susheela Welcome tothe future of world fusion ... and she's

Sunday Herald, The, Apr 7, 2002 by Sue Wilson

Susheela Raman's musical road has been long and winding, but it's increasingly paved with gold. Last year her debut album, Salt Rain, was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize; and in January she was named best newcomer at the inaugural Radio 3 World Music Awards. The 28- year-old singer's sound is a free-ranging but cohesive splicing of Indian, African, blues, jazz, funk and folk influences.

She describes it as "essentially reflecting the reality of here and now: post-colonial England in the 21st century", but her personal journey stretches right around the world and back through several centuries.

Born in London to south Indian parents, Raman emigrated with them to Australia aged four, but grew up immersed in the ancient tradition of Carnatic classical music. As a teenager, she abandoned this early training to explore blues, funk and soul, but already the seeds of future fusions were taking root.

"I remember experimenting back then with combinations of blues songs and Sanskrit chants," she says. "The desire to somehow bring these different strands together was there from very early on."

The next outing was a visit to India in 1995, to study with the revered Hindustani vocalist Shruti Sadolikar. "He not only helped me retrain my voice - which I'd been pushing too hard with the blues stuff - but made me think about music in a completely different way, and hear it at a deeper level," she recalls.

After her return to England in 1997, Raman teamed up with RealWorld producer and guitarist Sam Mills to make an album. That was when she discovered that her way forward started right back where she began. "We'd been working on the album for a while when classical compositions I'd known as a child began to resurface," she says. "I hadn't sung these songs at all for about 10 years, so when I came back to them they suddenly had a whole new life. And then Sam started putting chords to them, which you don't find at all in the original tradition. It felt like a huge turning-point and an entirely natural progression at the same time, as if the different aspects of myself were finally coming together."

Raman's sense of liberation is vibrantly expressed on Salt Rain. The album finds her singing in five different languages with musicians from India, Romania, France, Greece, Egypt, Kenya, America and Spain. The material ranges from 18th century devotional lyrics to original songs, plus covers of the Jungle Book's Trust In Me and Tim Buckley's Song To The Siren. One critic likened it to "a masala- gypsy-klezmer band with one foot in the Delta".

Raman proffers the capsule epithet "global acoustic soul". Anything, but world music. "It's a fiction," she says.

Raman has also gained a name as a stunning live performer, who forcefully dispels stereotypes both of ethereal Asian femininity and world-music worthiness. Her sultry, leather-trousered stage persona, according to one critic, "makes Kylie look like a nun". This may be slightly overstating the case, but Raman doesn't wholly reject the comparison, confessing: "I do have a certain upfrontness about me - but then I did grow up in Australia."

Susheela Raman plays the Aros Experience, Skye, April 18; Farr Hall, near Inverness, April 19; Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, April 20; Byre Theatre, St Andrews, April 21; Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, April 23; Tolbooth, Stirling, April 24 www.narada.com/SusheelaBio.htm