It took Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood more than a decade to follow acclaimed 2015 album “Junun.” A musician died. A pandemic intervened. And then there were the visas.
“Ranjha,” released last month via World Circuit/BMG, reunites Greenwood with Israeli musician Shye Ben Tzur — who divides his time between Israel and India — and their ensemble The Rajasthan Express for a follow-up to their debut. In the intervening years Greenwood has composed film scores, recorded “Jarak Qaribak” with Israeli rock musician Dudu Tassa, and played in The Smile with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke – but this is the project he kept coming back to.
Where “Junun” was recorded inside the 15th-century Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, “Ranjha” was made at Greenwood’s studio in Oxfordshire. “We wanted to give that privilege to the Indians, and have them live and work for a few weeks in the U.K.,” he says. “If a project is going to be collaborative, it felt like there should be a straight exchange of experience for all the musicians.”
The journey to the finished record was longer than anyone expected. One of the two qawwals — singers in the Sufi devotional tradition of qawwali — on the record, Zaki Sahib, died suddenly after a rehearsal in India during the preparation of new material. “This was devastating to us all,” Greenwood says. Writing sessions had already begun more than five years before the album’s completion, with work also interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The other qawwal, Zakir, is Zaki’s brother; on “Ranjha,” he plays a Moog synthesizer and a church organ for the first time.
