This group was founded in the late 1980s by jazz keyboardist Dwiki Dharmawan. Their early recordings present original fusion jazz tunes with complex harmonies and rhythms. They include jazz songs, some in English, sung by a female Javanese-Sundanese singer, Trie Utami, who offers polished and sophisticated imitations of African-American jazz vocal styles. Yet beginning around 1993, members of the group, particularly Dwiki and Trie, grew tired of merely imitating the music they admired from the West. Because the core members had all spent much of their youth in West Java (Sunda), they decided to incorporate Sundanese musical elements into their music, adding local experts on saron, boning, rebab and kendang. In short, they set out to create a hybrid variety of music, mixing Western and indigenous Indonesian musical instruments and elements.

In 1994 they released "Mystical Mist," in which some pieces sounded more like jazz fusion and others more Sundanese. On "Magical Match," the blend is even more throughout. One of the ingenious ideas they have employed is the tuning of their Western instruments to the scales of Sundanese traditional music. Dwiki programmed in a complex alteration of pitches for his keyboard and worked out special fingerings so that when he strikes certain combinations of black and white keys on his keyboard, he can produce the tones of slendro, pelog or other scales typical of Sundanese traditional music. The bass player uses an electric bass with no frets. With skillful placement of his fingers, he can play bass patterns in slendro and other non-Western scales. On this album Trie Utami sings not like a jazz singer but with the distinctive timbre of a Sundanese female singer (pesindhen).

The meaning this music has for KRAKATAU members and for their fans in Indonesia is its ability to "Sundanize" jazz or pop music and to "jazz" or "modernize" Sundanese music at the same time. Its ambiguity provides a bridge between the seemingly incompatible worlds of local Indonesian/traditional culture and Western/modern culture. They clearly hope that this music will reach beyond Indonesia to attract listeners from around the world, not only to their own music but also to the rich treasury of Indonesia's traditional music.

By R. Anderson Sutton. Excerpt taken from Worlds of Music: An Introduction to the Music of the World's Peoples.