Jonny Greenwood and Shye Ben Tzur's Ranjha is out, made in Oxfordshire

Ranjha, the second album by Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood and The Rajasthan Express, is out today on World Circuit/BMG, more than ten years after Junun. That record was made in the 15th-century Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur, with Paul Thomas Anderson filming. This time Greenwood suggested his studio in Oxfordshire, which meant bringing the Rajasthani players to England. The album was announced in March, and “Shemesh” followed in April.

Greenwood tells Mojo that the UK visas were a nightmare, since many of the musicians had no address. We were hoping the immigration officer didn't notice that they were all born on January 1, because a lot of them didn't know their dates of birth.¹

More than 20 musicians sat in a big circle and played all day, every day, for two or three weeks, with Greenwood on bass or guitar in the room. Afterwards he overdubbed more bass, programmed drums and added keyboards and the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument and one of his favourites. Junun had only Indian percussion; here Tom Skinner, the drummer in The Smile, plays drums, and the Carnatic violinist Jyotsna Srikanth joins too. The trumpeter, Aamir Bhiyani, was handed tubas borrowed from the neighbours' children, and Greenwood kept telling him he sounded like Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis, neither of whom he had heard of.

The pandemic slowed the album down, and so did the death of Zaki Ali Qawwal, one of the singers on Junun, during a rehearsal in November 2021. Ben Tzur says they were in Ajmer, before a Sufi shrine, when Zaki lost feeling in his leg; the stroke killed him within minutes. It was awful, gruesome. He was an amazing man. He was one of the singers when the Rajasthan Express toured with Radiohead.¹ His younger brother, Zakir Ali, sings on Ranjha, and on the opener, “Shiqwa”, he plays a Moog synthesiser in place of his harmonium, at Greenwood's suggestion.

Ben Tzur, who grew up in Israel and moved to Ajmer to study Qawwali, felt Junun was tied to the shrine there, and this time he pictured it floating free. How would it sound if it was a shrine in space?¹ Greenwood and the producer, Sam Petts-Davies, took to asking him whether a sound was “shrine in space” enough. The songs are sung in Hebrew, Urdu, Hindi and Panjabi, and the title track sets a poem by the Sufi poet Bulleh Shah. Ben Tzur says they talked about holding the record back because of the political climate, and decided to put it out.

The songs start as Ben Tzur's sketches, and the harmony comes later. Shye tends to write things with one or two chords, so every time you hear a chord change, that's probably my interference.³ On “Saqi” Greenwood worried he was adding too many, until one of the singers cried and said the changes made it more emotional.

Ranjha, tracklist