Jazzing up the Beatles

This weekend, a group of jazz artists is getting together for a concert like no other. The band, led by renowned flautist, Rajeev Rana, will pay a tribute to The Beatles with arrangements inspired from jazz music.

“I’ve been a lover of Beatles music and jazz for as long as I can remember,” says Rajeev. “I have also found that, despite efforts being put into jazz festivals, it doesn’t receive as much attention as it should. Since The Beatles remain one of the most loved bands, I thought this would be a great way of bringing jazz to music lovers who do not know much about the genre.” This attempt follows a similar experiment that the flautist made a year ago, where he and a group of musicians took classic rock and Motown hits through the ages from Led Zeppelin to The Rolling Stones and turned them into jazz numbers.

“The whole concert will be an instrumental set-up,” says Rajeev. “Everybody will recognise the tunes, but the treatment is completely different.” The band has got a number of talented musicians, like Carl Clementes, who will play the saxophone and Ramon Ibrahim on the trombone weaving harmonies into the original composition, guitar riffs by Sanjay Divecha and piano singles by Anurag Naidu. The musician promises a line-up of Beatles classics like Let it Be, Hey Jude and Michelle, all changed up using swing, syncopated rhythms and other jazz treatments.

On July 2, 7.30 pm onwards, At Tata Theater, NCPA, Nariman Point