What if a guitar could speak two dialects at once? Anupam Shobhakar answers with Liquid Reality, a sleek, high-voltage suite where raga logic and jazz harmony finish each other’s sentences. After 2023’s landmark Raga Jhinjhoti on Fretless Guitar—the first Indian classical recording on a fretless guitar—the New York–based guitarist, composer, and sarodist turns lineage into leverage, channeling the Senia Maihar Gharana and his training under Aashish Khan into a custom double‑neck instrument that moves from fretted chords to fretless meends without breaking stride.
The set glides from Sufi‑tinged glow to progressive jazz‑rock uplift with an international cast: pianists Utsav Lal and Santiago Liebson, kanjeera titan Swami Selva Ganesh, vocalists Ona Kirei and Ben Parag, and percussionists Satoshi Takeishi, Chris Savarino, and Gumbi Ortiz. La Danse de Bonheur becomes a bright, contemporary conversation with Shakti; Anjaneya channels Hanuman in roaring, interlocked rhythms; Formless strips everything to guitar and kanjeera, letting silence do the counting.
File it between the harmonic poise of Kurt Rosenwinkel, the colour play of Nels Cline, and the fire of John McLaughlin/Shakti, yet it lands unmistakably as Shobhakar.