All our songs are rehearsed: Dhruv Ghanekar

Jazz guitarists pop up around every corner, each one eager to show off his skill and how well he can improvize. And in this general melee, a guitarist who actually puts melody above cleverness is hard to come by. That’s where Dhruv Ghanekar comes in.
In town for a gig, Dhruv intends to resurrect his 2007 album , Distance, which brings the traditions of Indian music and jazz together into a series of gentle melodies and rhythms.And while even Dhruv can’t resist the odd crazy crescendo, it only lends this otherwise mellow album just the right amount of jazzy unpredictability.
“This new take on it is going to be very energetic and very loud, because I’m playing with a bunch of very rocked out musicians,” he says. Rocked out they certainly are, as this lineup sees some of Mumbai’s best known musicians with Tala Faral on the sax and keyboard, Sheldon D’Silva on bass and the legendary Gino Banks on drums. “My lineup is very solid,” states Dhruv, “Take Gino, for example. He can play Indian rhythms and play with a jazz band, too.”
With a louder, more energetic, more rock version of the originally mellow, jazzy tunes, Dhruv says his sound has evolved over the past five years. “My earlier influences were quite jazzy. I’d listen to guitarists like John Scofield and Scott Henderson. Now, I listen to a lot of African and Arabic music and their interpretations of jazz, which I work into my own sound,” says Dhruv.
So as four of India’s most skilled jazz musicians take to the stage together, is the audience likely to find itself at a jam session? “All our songs are rehearsed,” says Dhruv, emphatically, adding, “But there are sections , the solos, that are completely on the spur of the moment. I think it’s unfair to the audience to come unprepared .”
Dhruv Ghanekar brings you experiences from his sessions with some of the biggest names in music, including Richard Bona, Trilok Gurtu, Ustad Zakir Hussain, AR Rahman and Louis Banks, to name a few.
— CONTRIBUTED BY DARSHANA RAMDEV