Navarasa - Nine emotions

"Yorkston/Thorne/Khan has evolved from a project born out of quiet respect for each other's crafts into something aiming to blend them in a manner that truly forges new ground. Accordingly, Navarasa: Nine Emotions is a rollercoaster of vibrancy".

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"A ground-breaking vision ... The latest from James Yorkston, Jon Thorne and Suhail Yusuf Kahn takes on the Herculean task of expressing the scope of human emotion ... Yorkston draws often on traditional Scottish poetry and songs, inhabiting their beauty and their wildness. Kahn is majestic as a singer and a player, weaving labyrinthine melodies that are sometimes blissfully light, sometimes crushingly dark. Thorne's role is the most understated, yet often the most important. His earthy, resonant bass invokes subtle shifts in momentum, the record's guiding force on its winding journey".

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"It's their most ambitious and fully developed work yet, taking as its theme the nine nava (emotions) or rasa (sentiments) that irrigate the arts of the [Indian] sub-continent ... The album's high point comes when the poetry of Robert Burns melds hypnotically and wondrously with raga and qawwali on the ten-minute long epic 'Westlin Winds', representing Adbutha. Yet each piece offers something fresh and unique as guitar, double bass and sarangi create an exquisite soundbed of drones, pulses, rhythms and melodies that draws on Sufism, traditional Scottish folk song and Indian light classical forms, and ties them together as if they were always meant to be natural companions".