MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel. The term British invasion usually refers to a time in the 1960s when a bunch of raucous and very white rock bands brought their music to these shores. The sounds coming out of Britain today are decidedly different. As Britain has evolved into a multicultural society, home to a new generation with roots in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, so too has its music scene.
One of those capturing the sound of the new Britain is composer Nitin Sawhney.
NPR's Bilal Qureshi visited Sawhney at his studio in South London, and he has this profile.
BILAL QURESHI: Nitin Sawhney is the kind of musician who can perform with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall one day and DJ a club in Singapore or Dubai the next. And although he doesn't usually sing on his records, he isn't one to mince words.
Mr. NITIN SAWHNEY (Musician): It makes me laugh when I hear people saying that music or art becomes too political because I think, well, if you got nothing to say, you don't open your mouth.
QURESHI: And on his latest album, Sawhney wanted to say something about the aftermath of the attacks on London in July of 2005.
(Soundbite of song, "Days of Fire")
Mr. SAWHNEY: (Singing) There's no more trains going that way. There's no more trains coming this way. You better make your way home, son. There's something going down in London.
QURESHI: He says the train and bus bombings that summer tore something in the fabric of London, giving rise to paranoia and suspicion toward the city's minority communities.
(Soundbite of song, "Days of Fire")
Mr. SAWHNEY: (Singing) On these streets where I played and these trains that I take, I saw fire. But now I've seen the city change in oh so many ways since the days of fire.
QURESHI: And so begins his response, a record of collaborations he's called "London Undersound."
Mr. SAWHNEY: I didn't want it to be a really negative album or anything like that. And one of the reasons why I got so many collaborators involved in the album was because I wanted to dilute some of the intensity that I felt about London.
QURESHI: So he worked with the Spanish group Ojos de Brujo, sitar player Anoushka Shankar, even Paul McCartney. Fellow Londoner and reggae singer Natty says Nitin Sawhney is the kind of guy who thinks about music first.
Mr. NATTY (Reggae Singer): But it's also all about the people who can do the right music for that situation. You get a whole load of guys who say I'm not going to have any white dudes in my band, or I'm not going to have any brothers in my band. You get silly things like that, which obviously Nitin wouldn't do because Nitin's cool as hell.
(Soundbite of song, "Days of Fire")
Mr. SAWHNEY: (Singing) Delayed trains, delayed trains. Didn't plan for death on the subway. So I step out the station, Brazilian name all over TV. Realization I was on the next train, could've been me.
QURESHI: Composer Nitin Sawhney was profiled for the British newspaper The Guardian by Laura Barnett.
Ms. LAURA BARNETT (Arts Editor, The Guardian): What he's trying to say is that we're all Londoners. We're all British. We're not British-Asian, we're not white, we're not black. We're just people. And by drawing all these influences together into one organic whole, which is more successful on some occasions than on others, he's creating something greater than the sum of its parts. And that's kind of who we are. We're a mongrel mix, and he celebrates that.
QURESHI: Nitin Sawhney works out of studios in Brixton, a neighborhood in South London hit by race riots in the 1980s. Outside the entrance to the Brixton tube station, groups of Bengali women in headscarves walk past Afro-Caribbean families on their way to the Sunday market.
(Soundbite of music)
QURESHI: Inside, in a large studio space, Sawhney has gathered seven musicians to rehearse for an upcoming performance.
Mr. SAWHNEY: Do you feel it's as comfortable for you to sing in D as in C?
Unidentified Woman #1: No. It's in C-sharp, that one.
QURESHI: They're seated in a long semicircle, with Sawhney at one end, flamenco guitar by his side. He has a subdued, understated presence as he guides the players: a drummer, cellist, flutist, tabla player and one of three vocalists, a young white singer named Nicki Wells.
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN (Columnist, The Independent): You almost can't hear that it is a white woman singing an Indian raga. There's sort of a stripping that goes on and a melding, which is amazing.
QURESHI: Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a columnist for the British newspaper The Independent.
Ms. ALIBHAI-BROWN: He is a supreme musician. And I think he has this facility of bringing together, kind of almost stripping people of their inherited identities when they work with him.
(Soundbite of music)
Unidentified Woman #2: (Singing in foreign language)
QURESHI: What Nitin Sawhney does is often called fusion. He prefers confusion because he says he wants to challenge what his listeners expect when they see a blonde singer take the mike or what they assume when they see an Indian composer step on stage.
Mr. SAWHNEY: And that's one of the things I like to do is de-contextualize certain traditional forms so that we hear them in a different way and we start to become more aware of the power of them because I think you can get used to hearing certain singers in one way and think, okay, well, I know what that's all about now. But as soon as you hear something else going on underneath their voices, you look at them differently. It gives you a new perspective, a new angle on hearing how their voice comes out and what they have to say.
(Soundbite of song, "Daybreak")
Unidentified Man: (Singing in foreign language)
QURESHI: Nitin Sawhney is a self-professed workaholic. "London Undersound" is his eighth studio album. And it adds to a critically acclaimed body of work that already includes more than 40 film soundtracks, original pieces for the National Ballet of China, even the Playstation 3.
In 2006, he composed a new score for a 1929 silent film set in India. It was projected in London's Trafalgar Square as Sawhney performed with the London Symphony Orchestra before an audience of thousands.
(Soundbite of music)
QURESHI: That music was deeply influenced by what Sawhney heard as a child at home. His parents immigrated to Britain from India in 1963, just a year before Nitin Sawhney was born. He and his brothers were the only nonwhite students at school. And throughout his life, he turned to music and a community of musicians to mitigate the racism he says he experienced.
Mr. SAWHNEY: It kind of performed a multitude of different roles in my life. I mean, in one way, it was a place of refuge. It was also a place of inspiration. It was a place of no boundaries. It was a place where I could connect with other people without having to worry about linguistic barriers.
QURESHI: But just as Nitin Sawhney's music continues to blur the outlines of what a British record can sound like, his generation is part of a broader trend that's recasting what it means to be British.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown says while politicians debate the merits of multiculturalism in Parliament - whether all this mixing is good or bad - those debates overlook what's already happening on the ground.
Ms. ALIBHAI-BROWN: In terms of friendship, love, sex, there just isn't a drama here anymore about whether it should be allowed, it should be seen, it represents a threat. It just is who we are. And that says something, I think, because from that stems art, stems music, stems theater, but also stems eventually a new national identity.
QURESHI: And in breathing life into London's undersound and in bringing to stage performers from the city's newest communities, Nitin Sawhney continues to rearrange the sound of the British invasion.
Bilal Qureshi, NPR News.
(Soundbite of music)
SIEGEL: You can hear songs from Nitin Sawhney's "London Undersound" at nprmusic.org.
(Soundbite of music)
BLOCK: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.