Melody king Allah Rakha Rahman will set off on a 15-city world tour with his Unity of Light concert from Kolkata on February 1.
For Rahman, this will be his maiden world tour that will take him to cities in the US, Canada, the Gulf and East Asia. There will be some Indian stopovers as well for the concert.
Rahman has already hit the town with members of his troupe coming in one by one. Several Bollywood artistes, including S P Balasubramaniam, Sonu Nigam, Udit Narayan, Hariharan, Shankar Mahadevan, Sukhwinder Singh and Sadhana Sargam will share the stage with the Muqabla man.
Hectic preparations are on at the Salt Lake stadium to put up a giant stage and arrange hi-tech acoustics and sound systems. The show, Rahman's first live concert in India, is being billed as a never before event.
The organisers are promising that the show would not only come as a surprise because of several novel aspects in sound and light technologies, but also in atmospherics. The speciality of the show would be a 30-piece string and brass section and very strong percussion and electronic parts. They say it is already a sell-out event.
Rahman says the show has been named the Unity of Light concert because he believed music had the power to illuminate hearts in these times of trouble.
The master composer said the show would also be different in that he would draw from the musical traditions of the cities the concert travels to make it all the more appealing to audiences: "We will do a few of my numbers translated in Bengali."
Hero Honda is the title sponsor of the concert.