A pukka player

The cellist Matthew Barley, like others before him, has turned East for his latest project. But his improvisations with the sarod master Amjad Ali Khan are a world apart

The groundbreaking record that Yehudi Menuhin made with the sitar master Ravi Shankar during London's first flush of enthusiasm for the sounds of Rajasthan was called East Meets West. Nigel Kennedy's new CD, East Meets East, is his explicit homage to that initial foray by the great violinist who was his mentor. Kennedy is collaborating with the Kroke band from Poland, and his disc is a seductive introduction to Central Europe's klezmer world. But as explorations go, it is not exactly death-defying: the klezmer path has been trodden smooth by Western fiddlers, and Kroke's musicians are - as Kennedy is - conservatoire-trained. Since they were already on the same wavelength, East Meets East was a guaranteed success.

But this month sees the release of a musical experiment that might have been titled West Goes East, because it reflects what the cellist Matthew Barley has been up to with the sarod master Amjad Ali Khan and his sarod-playing sons Amaan and Ayaan. Their encounter may have been recorded at the Royal Festival Hall, but it is on Indian musical territory: its two ragas require Barley to enter a world far removed from Beethoven and Bach. This really is a risky enterprise.

Beethoven is written down and "fixed": ragas are improvised. The cello's strings are bowed, and pitch is determined by the fingertips: the sarod - a descendant of the Afghan rabab - is plucked, and its pitch is determined by pressure on its steel strings with the back of the fingernails. Western classical performers acquire their skills at college, and are then expected to go out into the world and get on with it; Indian classical players spend decades working as domestic servants to the masters from whom they learn their art, about how to react to other players, and how to respond to the audience; about how to be on stage.

Strings Attached is the sweetly-punning title of the CD, which reflects the culmination of a three-year collaboration. I ask how it came about. The stately Amjad - now celebrating 50 years of concerts - says he had long wanted to "fuse" with Western strings. "I have always imagined cello and violin with sarod, complementing one another. Two plucked instruments create confusion, but a combination of bowing and plucking is beautiful. And I wanted no percussion - just pure melody."

"Out of the blue," says Barley, "I got the invitation to collaborate." That was perhaps not so surprising, given that this cellist has long made a practice of working with jazz musicians, and that his new-music group Between The Notes regularly blazes new trails. "As I was passing through Delhi, I stopped off." Amjad takes up the tale: "I wrote a piece for him - in a beautiful morning raga which is very popular in India, based on a seven-note scale." Barley: "It seemed a good one to start with, because I couldn't play a wrong note." Amjad: "I sang and sang." Barley: "And I wrote it all down." Amjad: "Which was good, because after creating, I tend to forget."

It seems they didn't need to do much explaining. "Matthew goes with the flow," says Amjad approvingly. "We tell him this is the scale, and he's improvising straight away." Barley qualifies that: "But my position here is not to try to become an Indian classical musician - I couldn't do that, and it wouldn't have integrity. The intention is to express the same spirit on stage, but my improvisations would not be copying theirs. I'm doing my own thing." It turns out that he has listened to Menuhin's East Meets West with less than total admiration. "Its huge limitation was that Menuhin didn't improvise. By excluding that, you cut out 75 per cent of your possibilities."

But he's full of admiration for these Indian players - not least for their stoical acceptance of the pain from bruised and scored nails. Like the cello, the sarod is - as Amaan puts it - a "naked" instrument, in that it has no guitar-style frets to guide the fingers. "Western string players use vibrato to disguise the fact that their pitch may not be spot-on," says Barley. "These men's intonation is phenomenal. They subdivide the 12 chromatic pitches into microtones, and they're still accurate."

And in one respect he's frankly envious. "Indian music depends on how you feel at the time, and how the audience is responding. If I come on stage to play the cadenza of the Shostakovich cello concerto, I may be in a fantastically happy mood, but I've still got to play that dark, doom-laden thing. Likewise, even if the audience is restless, I've still got to observe those big silences. Indian classical music lets your mood carry the piece where you want."

What Barley envies most, however, is the purity and continuity of their musical culture, of which Amjad and his sons are the perfect embodiment. "I learnt to play from my father,' says Amjad. "When my sons came into the world, we sang the traditional song into their ears, and as babies they showed a positive response. We taught them to sing, then to beat time, then we gave them miniature sarods. As my father had taught me to play - making me imitate on my sarod what he sang to me - so I did with my sons."

Now the record is out, we can all make a judgement on the experiment. After the ritual sarod opening, Barley enters with a slow phrase including a quintessentially Western arpeggiated flourish; feeling his way into this parallel world, he's brought Bach along for company. But then the plot thickens: as the ideas get tossed to and fro, with the sarod's bright, sinewy clarity balanced by the cello's expansive warmth, you sense all the players striving for common ground - and triumphantly finding it. Barley has not yet listened to it - live recordings are alarming enough, he says, but when they're improvised as well...

Our colloquial adjective "pukka" is borrowed from the Hindi word pakka, meaning "mature" or "perfected" when applied to musicians. Matthew Barley should relax, because this is a very pukka CD.

'Strings Attached' is on the Navras label. Matthew Barley's 'The Silver Swan' is released by Black Box this week. 'East Meets West' is on EMI