Parapar (meaning 'from shore to shore') is a band whose members divide their time between Kolkata and London. The music is built around the voice of singer-songwriter Moushumi Bhowmik, with a repertoire combining original compositions and rare, disappearing songs drawn from Bengali folk traditions, collected by Moushumi in Assam, Bangladesh and West Bengal. Parapar's distinctive musical language stresses the continuity between diverse Bengali musical traditions - bhaowaia, Baul-gan, kirtan, bhatiyali, adhunik - and draws fresh parallels with blues, Western classical music and rock, using these diverse building blocks to construct a subtle, unitary style. The band lineup is: Moushumi Bhowmik (Vocals), Oliver Weeks (Guitar), Ros Acton (Cello), Ben Hillyard (Bass), Derek Scurll (Drums) and Satyaki Banerjee (Dotara - guest member).

Parapar began in 2002 as a collaboration between Oliver (then a composition postgraduate at the Royal Academy of Music) and Moushumi. They played their first gigs in 2003 (including the Brick Lane Mela, the LSE and the Kufa Gallery), and recorded a six-track demo, featuring new material and re-recordings of Shopno dekhbo bolay and Jessore Road, as well as Baul and Bhaowaia songs. In 2004, they performed Parapar's first Indian gigs in Kolkata (Jadavpur University, the British Council) and West Bengal (Visva Bharati University, Shantiniketan). This paved the way for a 2005 larger tour of West Bengal and Bangladesh, which was so enthusiastically received that Kolkata's Gyan Manch concert hall and Dhaka's British Council were sold out several times over. In Kolkata, the band was joined by Satyaki, and in Dhaka by Shopon Mian on the dhol, the late Abinash Shil on dotara and Bangladeshi folk singer Kananbala Sarkar.

In 2006 and 2007 Parapar played two further concert series in London, adding drums to the lineup (gigs included Kobi Nazrul Centre Brick Lane, the Kalamazoo Club, The Brady Centre). The 2007 documentary Bridging My Home, filmed in London and Kolkata by film maker Debanjan Bandyopadhyay (in collaboration with the One World Broadcasting Trust), focused on Parapar's creative process and the ways in which it successfully straddles geographical, cultural and linguistic distances (Moushumi and Satyaki live in Kolkata whilst the other band members are based in London).

The last two years have seen a diversification of Parapar activity, including gigs in London (Ginglik) and Stockholm, the latter organised by Bangladeshi expatriates in Sweden. This has been accompanied by lecture-performances presenting Moushumi's ethnomusicological research at Oxford, Edinburgh and Gothenburg Universities, SOAS (London), Kala Bhavan (Shantiniketan, India), BRAC (Dhaka, Bangladesh) and Jadavpur University (Kolkata). Upcoming performances include gigs in New York and London in July and October (to be confirmed). Parapar will also be arranging and recording new material in the autumn in preparation for a full-length album release.

“The result was not 'fusion' in the popular (and usually banal) sense of the word for authentic music is always already 'fused'… there is something intense and actual about the human sound of stringed instruments that matches the intellectually complex, often heart-breaking inwardness of Moushumis singing.” Aveek Sen, The Telegraph, Kolkata, 6 May 2005