Nitin Sawhney: The man with the whole world on his album

Nitin Sawhney layers song, sampling and speech, and keeps a president waiting.

For his last album, the Mercury Prize-nominated Beyond Skin, Nitin Sawhney mixed a richness of music with brief sound-samples and spoken-word interludes, including his Indian parents talking movingly about their decision to emigrate to the UK. This time round, for the follow-up Prophesy, released next week, Sawhney has gone much further: the range of musical styles is even wider, while the spoken-word sections have expanded to provide a kind of intertextual running commentary on the album as a whole.

There's the rapid-fire delivery of a Chicago taxi-driver ranting about world development; soul-jazz star Terry Callier intoning evangelically in a manner Sawhney likens to the tricksterish black narrator of a Coen Brothers film; a rap from an impossibly Runyonesque-handled character called Pinky Tuscadero; samples from speeches by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; a discourse by the Aboriginal vocalist Munderwy Yunopingu, and an interview with Nelson Mandela, recorded by Sawhney in South Africa.

If the project sounds epic enough already, this is before you factor in the music and the various guest stars: a 93-piece Bollywood orchestra recorded in Madras, a Brazilian orchestra recorded in Rio, the English Chamber Orchestra, the London Community Gospel Choir, a children's choir from Soweto, and vocal cameos from the Anglo-Yemeni singer Natacha Atlas, Algerian rai star Cheb Mami, as well as regular Sawhney singers Jayanta Bose, Eska, Tina Grace and Smoke City's Nina Miranda.

Is this over-egging the fusionist pudding? It's tempting to take that view, or at least it would be if Beyond Skin hadn't been so good, especially in an age when not much popular music is particularly good any more, and when few artists of whatever stripe bother to try to communicate their ideas at all, beyond a few cynical sound-bites. That said, it will take a lot of listens before it's clear whether Prophesy represents an advance or a regression on Beyond Skin; at the moment it's still sounding rather too similar to its predecessor to make any accurate critical judgements at all.

"It's an album about a sense of trying to come to terms with the concept of development, which is something I've been concerned with since I was in Soweto and met all these kids who seemed to be so relaxed and to respect each other," Sawhney told me last month. "I became quite inspired by them, and I thought they felt really developed, and I also thought about what that meant. Whenever I was working on the computer or watching TV, I felt I was cocooned in this simulated reality, and I wanted to get a different idea of perspective and balance; I wanted to get back to this idea of consequence."

Nitin Sawhney has an air of quiet intensity about him that you could almost call ascetic if that word didn't seem so out of key with a story on pop music.

Brought up in Rochester by Indian parents, he took refuge in guitar and piano lessons partly as a response to racist bullying at school. He later studied Law and Accountancy at Liverpool University, where he also formed the comedy duo, the Secret Asians, with fellow student Sanjeev Bhaskar. Together, they created the template for the radio and television show Goodness Gracious Me, which Sawhney contributed to and wrote music for. Starting in 1993 with Spirit Dance, Sawhney has now made five albums, as well as composing for film, television, theatre and dance, and acting as a re-mixer for, among others, Sir Paul McCartney and Sting.

The new album was conceived and partly recorded in a round the world journey that took Sawhney to North and South America, Australasia and Africa. "The album is also an abstract kind of journey, of going out and meeting people and interacting with them, whether it's Terry Callier in Chicago or the Aborigines," Sawhney says. "They're all very spiritual people, or people feeling frustrated by a sense of imbalance. On top of a mountain in Bolivia, or on a beach in Arnhem Land, or in a snow blizzard in America, there was a feeling of risk and danger, of playing a piece while being somehow more present, of living in the moment. When you're in tune with your environment, things don't seem to matter. I know it sounds pretentious or hippy-ish, but I was trying to get away from clichés."

The interview with Mandela came about when Sawhney's record company, Virgin, and his manager, Neil Storey, offered him a wish-list of people whom he might like to meet. "They were Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Gandhi, and two of them were dead," Sawhney says. "But I think Nelson Mandela is a very open person, and he's also something of an Anglophile, which helped. I'd just read his book and it was humbling to meet him in his own home and have him telling you all these things. He's such a majestic, powerful, figure ­ six foot two or three or something ­ and very warm and welcoming. He treats you very much on the same level; he doesn't have any kind of superiority."

But did Nelson Mandela ­ who is heard saying "We are free to be free" on track eight, "Breathing Lights" ­ know who Nitin Sawhney was? "No, I don't think he knew who I was, and I didn't really expect him to. But when we were talking the phone went and it was President Mbeki and he said to tell him to call back in five minutes! In the West, someone's mobile would go off and they'd answer it, but instead it was at that level of respect, because you'd bothered to be there."

'Prophesy' is released by V2 Records on 18 June