Kronos Quartet with Asha Bhosle

The relentlessly exploring classical quartet has taken on a wide range of music from Phillip Glass to Jimi Hendrix and Ornette Coleman. Their cross-genre tendencies continue here with an homage to the music of Rahul Dev Burman, Bollywood’s pre-eminent composer of Indian film music. Burman’s compositions were a true world music mélange—combining elements of swing jazz, flamenco, gypsy, James Bond, mariachi, circus music and psychedelia to serve as narrative threads for the films’ flights of fantasy. Bhosle’s vocals are keen and gorgeous, lending a definite cinematic, playfully seductive quality to the compositions. Add in Wu Man on the Chinese pipa or lute and Zakir Hussain on tabla, and you’ve got quite a cross-cultural mix for a new kind of world music. Neither classical recital nor movie soundtrack, yet somehow both.