‘See-tar’: An instrument merging Jazz with Indian Classical music

Purbayan Chatterjee strikes a pose with his ‘see-tar’
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Sitar maestro Purbayan Chatterjee’s YouTube channel’s description reads ‘Sitar Explorer‘. In his latest single, Two-Thirds, released on March 26, Purbayan explores a curious instrument – a ‘see-tar‘. The instrument looks like a transparent sitar made out of plexi glass or methyl methacrylate. The main parts of it — the  taardan and  jawari — are made with buffalo horn and the steel strings are silver-plated. It is 1,070mm long and comes without the traditional sitar’s hemispherical form on the backside and the neck, which makes it doable to play whereas standing.

In the six minute music video Two-Thirds, Purbayan performs the ‘see-tar’ and dapples with the genres of jazz and Indian Classical alongside artist Taufiq Qureshi on the djembe, British-Austrian drummer Bernhard Schimpelsberger and Nakul Chugh on the keyboard.

To visually improve his efficiency, the maestro wished to introduce a brand new ingredient apart from the same old modifications in gentle, multimedia and visuals. “I had thought of a plexi glass sitar  about 10-11 years ago. I took the design to my Belgian friend Klaas Janssens who learnt sitar-making in Varanasi. He agreed to design it for me, that’s how it came into existence .”

Purbayan provides that the novelty of the instrument is the tonality which supplies nice scope to the consequences processor to provide ambient music. It generates, “Moody kind of tones as well as very racy and edgy overdrive tones. On the other hand, the acoustic sitar is a very resonant instrument which this doesn’t have. The see-tar doesn’t have much resonance. All the effects and ability of the processor to generate different sounds comes out at its best,” explains Purbayan.  

“If I were to perform with rock musicians, I could visually enhance the presentation with this instrument. But, I am very picky about using this instrument. I don’t use it for the heck of it. I use it only in songs where it will add something to it,” provides Purbayan. Over the years, he has performed the see-tar for the soundtrack of the film Pink for Shantanu Moitra , in  UnIndian for Salim-Sulaiman and most not too long ago in the Amazon Prime Video collection Bandish Bandits for its second season. 

Making of Two-Thirds

One day at Purbayan’s studio PAAMF (Purbayan Art and Artists Music Foundation) in Mumbai, the maestro was taking part in across the traces of Two-Thirds. “When Taufiq bhai and the others came, we had kept the cameras rolling and started playing around the hook lines and the song just happened. It was almost done in the stream of consciousness. We recorded and shot, it was ready for production.”