This week sees the release of Ranjha, a second album of collaborations between Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, Israeli singer, musician and bandleader Shye Ben Tzur and the Indian musicians known as The Rajasthan Express. Its euphoric and subtly psychedelic dialogue between Qawwali, among other subcontinental folk and classical traditions, and Western music contexts comes over a decade since their first, 2015’s Junun, was accompanied by a documentary film directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, the creator of There Will Be Blood, Phantom Thread and 2025’s One Battle After Another, hit movies that all feature Jonny Greenwood soundtracks. While there was always an intention to make another record, the pandemic and other crises intervened, including the death of Junun singer Zaki Ali Qawwal during a November 2021 rehearsal.
“It was awful, gruesome,” says Greenwood, the subject of last month’s MOJO Interview. “He was an amazing man. He was one of the singers when the Rajasthan Express toured with Radiohead. So that slowed us down. Everything in India is quite slow-moving.”
Junun had been recorded in the evocative 15th century Mehrangarh fort in Jodhpur with equipment assembled by Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich. This time, Greenwood suggested a more conventional (in Western terms) recording studio. Conveniently for Greenwood, one in Oxford.
“We didn’t want to record the same album twice,” Shye Ben Tzur tells MOJO. “So it should be different enough in some ways, and at the same time have the DNA of [Junun]. The idea to make it in a studio was one of the first things we knew was going to affect and dictate a different method of work.”
However, that proved easier said than done.
“Getting visas to get Indian musicians into the UK was a nightmare,” explains Greenwood. “We were hoping the immigration officer didn’t notice that they were all born on January 1, because a lot of them didn’t know their dates of birth. A lot of them don’t have addresses. It’s all quite sketchy. We managed to do two or three weeks of recording in Oxford, just playing all day every day.”
While the ecstatic singing – in Hebrew, Urdu, Hindi and Panjabi – of Ranjha echoes the beatific vibe of Junun, the centre of gravity of the music has shifted with its location. The collective have been wary all along of imposing Western structures on Indian music. “There’s some gruesome music done in this fusion [tradition] that’s just awful,” notes Greenwood. “Sub-massagey, or heavy rock beats played over sitars. So there were lots of things to avoid.”
Yet there is more of a sense of the Indian music that sparked psychedelic rock in the ’60s feeding back, something about the slinky groove and wooshing textures of the song Marbolot, for instance, that’s reminiscent of Santana. On Junun, notes Ben Tzur, there was an emphasis on instruments local to Rajasthan; on Ranjha, the palette is expanded to include more colours from Indian classical music, more traditional ragas. But this was not the limit of the expansion.
“The shrine of the main saint of the Chishtiya Sufis [ie. 12th century mystic Khawaja Gharib Nawaz] is in Ajmer, which is in Rajasthan,” explains Ben Tzur. “Making Junun, we felt very much connected to it somehow. Even though we were sitting in Jodhpur, we were feeling the presence of the devotional essence that we feel when we enter the shrine in Ajmer.
“But this time, I was thinking, What if the shrine was not in a fixed place? How would it sound if it was a shrine in space? That image of shrine in space brought in the imagination, and suddenly we were doing different things. And I remember one time Jonny was doing something on an analogue synth, and Sam [producer/engineer Sam Petts-Davis] was manipulating the sound, and Jonny was asking me, is this ‘shrine in space’ enough for you Shye?”
Ben Tzur was born in New York and raised in Israel, where he currently lives. At 19, he saw the Indian flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia and tabla player Zakir Hussain in concert in Jerusalem and became obsessed, moving to Ajmer and immersing in its music, inhaling Qawwali and the poetry of the Sufi saints, also marrying into an Indian family. Harmonising multiple musical traditions is the essence of Rajasthan Express; assembling the musicians in Oxford added complexity, but also opportunities for cultural dialogue.
“We were borrowing tubas from neighbours’ children for the trumpeter to play!” chuckles Greenwood. “The brass music tradition in Rajasthan is amazing because when the British left they left behind all these brass instruments from marching bands. They’ve created their own fascinating version of jazz. We kept saying to Aamir [Bhiyani], ‘You sound just like Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis,’ and he’s never heard of either of them.”
“Everyone has their own cultural musical heritage,” says Ben Tzur. “The singer Zakir Ali [the late Zaki’s younger brother] and his family – there’s his nephew Ehtisham Khan Ajmeri, the dholak [drum] player. They are ceremonial Qawwals. This is what they do every single day – they are singing in the ceremonies. And Nathoo Lal Solanki who plays the nagara drum. He’s coming from a family who for 400 years have played in one of the most important temples in Pushkar, which is a very sacred holy city for Hindus. And he has his own traditional heritage and rhythms and the way that he plays them.
“So each one has their own ways of approaching music, even though this music is original music. Everybody has to learn and put it together. But each one brings their own very particular flavours.”
Now the music of Ranjha – so intimately bound up with its makers’ particular religious and devotional traditions – is about to enter the outside world. “It’s like a photograph that has been in the dark room,” says Ben Tzur. “Now it’s coming out into the light.” There’s the reality of audiences and opinions, and hopefully, eventually, touring, with its even more problematic issues, now the world is even more hostile and suspicious, with visas and the like. Still, Ben-Tzur has a simple hope for Ranjha.
“I’m really hoping, you know, that that feeling of transcendence will come across outward, as much as we feel it in the room.”
Ranjha by Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood & The Rajasthan Express is out now on World Circuit/BMG.