Raag Jog | Indian Slide Guitar, Piano, Sitar & Tabla | Music of India | Kala Festival 2023

At Norden Farm Centre for the Arts in Maidenhead on 23 August 2023, four musicians performed Raag Jog as part of the Kala Festival: Pandit Debasis Chakroborty on Indian slide guitar, Deepak Shah on piano, Lovely Sharma on sitar, and Durjay Bhaumik on tabla.

Raag Jog belongs to the Kafi Thaat and uses a pentatonic scale with two Gandharas: Shuddha Ga in the ascent, Komal Ga in the descent. This dual-third produces a tension between brightness and depth that resists a single emotional category. Its vadi is Ma, its samay the late evening, and its characteristic movement circles back to the S-G-m cell in hypnotic, blues-adjacent phrases.

Across eleven minutes, slide guitar, piano, sitar, and tabla negotiate the raga's tonal ambiguity together. Chakroborty's glissandi exploit the natural slide between the two Gandharas; Shah's piano finds the raga's pentatonic framework in the Western instrument; Sharma's sitar carries the melodic core; and Bhaumik's tabla marks the rhythmic ground beneath all three.