An Invitation into the Unknown
Mauri invited me to see Mohini Dey at the Blue Note. I had only briefly heard of her—an Instagram clip here, a passing mention there. She first caught my attention with her musicianship, her fingers flying across the fretboard like a storm, lightning-fast and effortless. And of course, I was struck by her presence, luminous even through a screen.
I arrived with tempered expectations, but the moment the first note struck, I was swept into something else entirely—something more than a performance, more than a set. A vortex of sound and motion, a breaking of boundaries. Even compared to Thundercat’s Stephen Lee Bruner, and Dysrhythmia and Gorguts’s Colin Marston, what Mohini did felt different. It wasn’t just technical brilliance—it was instinct, it was breath, it was body and soul translated into vibration.
She didn’t just play the bass; she became it, and it became her. The instrument was no longer a foundation but a force, a pulse, a voice carving space into the air. Her lines weren’t supporting the music; they were shaping it, bending it, giving it form.
The Hypnotic Groove: Trance, Noodling, and Indian Classical Influence
Mohini wove a trance, each looped motif a thread in an endless tapestry of sound. Seamless legato phrasing, intricate melodic runs—her fingers barely seemed to touch the strings, yet every note bloomed with precision and warmth.
Her playing felt like a conversation, like whispers passed between waves, rising and falling in perfect, impossible harmony. She blurred the lines between jazz fusion and Indian classical, her embellishments a quiet incantation, a spell cast through sound. One moment, she was floating in shimmering harmonics, the next, cascading through a firestorm of notes, each one landing like a heartbeat, impossible to predict yet inevitable in its perfection.
The drummer, locked into her orbit, unraveled polyrhythms that defied expectation, yet somehow, she twisted them into something new, reshaping them like wet clay. Funk, hip-hop, metal—all threads in the same intricate weave, all absorbed into the pulse of her bass.
Metal Influence & The Explosive Rhythm Section
But what truly set her apart was her intensity—an intensity that held within it softness, sweetness, even stillness. There was no mistaking the metal coursing through her playing—aggressive fingerstyle attack, slap-and-pop accents that cut like lightning, and moments of tapped harmonics that rippled through the room like thunder.
She didn’t just hold the groove; she pushed it, twisted it, threw it into the sky and pulled it back down again. The drummer grinned, shaking his head, unable to believe the interplay unfolding between them. The saxophonist, caught in the momentum, chased after her, his notes swelling, colliding, dissolving into her lines.
And yet—there was something in the air.
The Saxophonist: A Strange Emotional Tension
I found myself bristling at the saxophonist. He was her newly made ex-husband, and though they were no longer tethered in love, they remained bound in music. There was no animosity between them, no battle on stage. Instead, they played as though they were sewing something back together—melody breaking, melody mending, endless melodic harmony.
Yet, at times, his lines felt too smooth, too polished, contrasting sharply with her raw unpredictability. He played like a storyteller; she played like a conjurer. His phrasing was deliberate, structured, where hers was instinctual, immediate—straight from the gut.
Still, even in their separation, their music remained whole. And maybe that was its own kind of beauty.
Studio vs. Live: The Unleashed Mohini
Hearing her live made me rethink her breakout album Mohini Dey. The studio recordings felt distant, contained, like a bird in a cage. On record, she leaned into jazz fusion, into progressive rock, threading her bass between guitar giants—Guthrie Govan, Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal. Titans in their own right, but in their presence, she sometimes disappeared into the background.
Live, though? Live, she was the orchestra. No compression. No blending. No filters softening the raw edge of her playing.
Her jazz became metal. Her grooves breathed, expanded, roared.
The album, polished and pristine, was only a shadow of what I witnessed at the Blue Note.
Melody, Harmonics & Musical Conversation
One of Mohini’s defining traits is how she treats harmonics—not as ornaments, not as decoration, but as integral voices in the melody. When the saxophonist stretched a note, bending it into a mournful cry, she answered with harmonics that shimmered in the space between his phrases. She wasn’t following—she was leading, guiding the sound toward something neither had planned.
Her chord progressions slipped effortlessly between major and minor, between the expected and the unknown, her playing bursting with color one moment, sinking into shadow the next. She leaned into pentatonic scales but shattered them with chromaticism, bending them until they became something new, something of her own making.
When the song ended, the room held its breath.
And then—applause, thunderous and unrelenting, as if the spell had finally broken and we had all woken up.
A Brief Exchange with Mohini
After the set, Mauri and I found her.
I looked at her, still caught in the wake of what I’d just witnessed, and the only words that came out were:
"Your jazz is so metal."
She giggled, her eyes sparking with something knowing.
Walking Away in a Trance
We stepped out into the New York night, with the city pulsing around us—all I could hear was her bass—low and growling, high and singing, alive in my bones.
This wasn’t just music I had listened to. It was music I had felt, music that had rewritten something inside me.
Mohini Dey doesn’t just play bass. She bends it to her will, makes it a voice, a living force. She is both the storm and the stillness, the whisper and the roar.
I walked away changed, knowing I had witnessed something truly transcendent.