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Drawn together by a shared desire to create fresh & exciting approaches to music making, Indus brings together four passionate performers with roots in diverse musical styles. Firefly, their first album, represents a significant chapter in the group's fascinating and remarkable journey. Through this live studio performance of over an hour of inspired music, Indus have combined carefully crafted arrangements & compositions with free flowing passages of improvisation & interplay. Their music endeavours to navigate through uncharted musical terrain while embracing the rich musical tapestry of India and Pakistan. Firefly mirrors the warmth & spontaneity shared with audiences through their live performances to-date and captures the group's integrity, sensitivity & aspirational vision. Indus is... Henrik Linnemann - Flute, Bass Flute Shahbaz Hussain - Tabla, Voice John Ball - Santoor Mohamed Assani - Sitar ALBUM REVIEW, FROOTS MAGAZINE, Aug/Sept 2010: Firefly is the debut release by the UK-based Indus. The quartet features Mohamed Assani (sitar), John Ball (santoor), Henrik Linnemann (western flute) and Shahbaz Hussain (tabla and vocals on 'A Night at the Court' and bols - rhythmic mnemonics - on 'In the Round.') Recorded live in studio, track titles like 'Mind the Gap,' 'Kafi Lounge,' and 'A Night at the Court' give flavours of what to expect. The music is out of a similar frame of mind that guided the Indian Quintet of Daya Shankar, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Tarun Bhattacharya, Ramesh Misra and Kumar Bose on their 'Raga-Ragini' back in 1988. What shines out is that this is an improvised art form. These compositions were not made for exact replication. Indus' progress is going to be one to keep a beady eye upon. Suggested entry points: 'Firefly' and 'In the Round.' (Ken Hunt) ALBUM REVIEW, FLUTE MAGAZINE, June 2010: The new CD from Indus, a four-piece ensemble predominantly formed of instruments from the Indian sub-continent, will be of great interest to those who want to explore how the western concert flute can cross cultural and stylistic borders. Henrik Linnemann, the Sheffield-based jazz flautist, is to be heard on a standard (silver?) concert flute as well as bass flute. His fellow musicians are Shahbaz Hussain on tabla and vocals, John Ball on santoor - a traditional Indian instrument closely related to the zither - and Mohamed Assani on sitar. The combination of instruments is particularly interesting as the upper partials and resonances of the two stringed instruments (santoor and sitar) combine to produce a bright, almost crystalline sound which contrasts with the much rounder, boomier sonority of the tabla. The flute slots in between these two opposing timbres and although the modern western instrument might lack the flexibility and tonal variety of the traditional Indian flute, especially in the execution of the characteristic meend or gamak - the microtonal slides and ornaments so much a feature of Indian melodic improvisation - it does bring a depth, clarity and precision to the ensemble. Listening to Linnemann's improvisation, one can definitely detect his western jazz roots even when using Indian ragas as his source material. Linnemann's talents as a flautist are particularly well showcased in this recording (for example, in the extended bass flute solo that opens the first track), although the disc as a whole is impressive for the equal integration and interplay of all four musicians. Out of the six tracks, four are extended compositions lasting more than eleven minutes, all sharing a sectional structure and, as with much Indian music, alternating highly complex rhythmically pre-determined sections with passages of freer improvisation. Kafi Lounge and In the Round have a more laid back, western jazz feel. By contrast, the evocative vocalisation of Shahbaz Hussain which opens A Night at the Court immerses us in the Indian classical tradition, as does his use of solkattu - the alliterative technique of rhythmic s
