Vishwa Mohan Bhatt

It was only at 25 years old that fate put him back on the music rails. That was when he chanced on a Spanish guitar left behind by a German student in his father’s school in 1967. Intrigued by its flexibility, he began to add to the instrument’s strings, modifying its shape, working on his left and right hand playing and mixing the techniques of the western Hawaiian guitar with those of the sarod, sitar and veena. The result was a 19-string archtop guitar he called the Mohan veena. Veena is the generic Sanskrit word for string instrument.
The combination of the three melody strings, four drones strings and 12 sympathetic strings creates a distinctive Indian sound. From the start, Bhatt allied it to his agile wire and thumb picks and his polished steel rod slide. Realising this was where his passion lied, the bearded inventor turned to India’s most celebrated sitarists, Ravi Shankar and became one of his best-known shishyas (disciples). Within three years he began recording songs for an enthusiastic domestic audience, and soon embarked on the international concert circuits. In 1989 he joined his guru Shankar for the audacious album “The Kremlin”.
Bhatt’s flawless legato and dazzling speed on the Mohan veena soon had music specialists calling him one of the world’s most versatile, expressive and original slide players. He eventually came to the attention of one of the most insatiably curious of western guitarists, Ry Cooder. The two teamed up for the 1994 album “A meeting by the river” which rightfully grabbed a Grammy Award that year. Reviewer Daniel Gioffre described the record as “a spontaneous outpouring of music, unhindered by convention or form....One of those few cross-genre albums in which the listener never feels for a second that there is some kind of fusion going on.”
The reward served as a trampoline for Bhatt’s international career and he was soon performing as far afield as Dubai, Russia, the US and Scotland. The Hindustan Times claimed he was the most popular Indian artist abroad and the Texas Express News called him “THE world music hero”. The accolades encouraged the veena composer to continue to record for both domestic and international audiences. The Nineties saw a prolific number of albums entering the market and revealed an unsuspected versatility in Bhatt’s playing. They included collaborations with the likes of Chinese erhu player Jei Bing Chen, African American bluesman Taj Mahal, and US dobro musician Jerry Douglas.

January 2005.

Daniel Brown