Graduel - Bonum est confiteri Domino

\"Graduel – Bonum est confiteri Domino\" is a track from the 1996 collaborative album Meeting of Angels. The composition features sitarist Nishat Khan and the early music vocal ensemble Ensemble Gilles Binchois. The album explores the fusion of North Indian classical music with medieval European sacred choral traditions.

The track appears as the fifth piece on the release. It spans a duration of 3 minutes and 3 seconds. The work adapts the Latin Gradual text \"Bonum est confiteri Domino\" (Psalm 91:2), blending Gregorian chant-inspired vocal lines with the improvisational phrasing and tonal colors of the sitar. The recording captures a live or studio interaction between Khan’s instrumental performance and the ensemble’s polyphonic singing, though specific session details remain undocumented.

Meeting of Angels released on June 1996 under the Italian label Amiata Records. The album adopted the CD format as its primary medium. The project emerged from a series of cross-cultural musical dialogues initiated in the 1990s, with Khan and Ensemble Gilles Binchois co-creating arrangements that juxtaposed raga-based structures with Western liturgical melodies. No additional composers or lyricists are credited for this track in available sources.

The album received attention for its experimental convergence of distinct musical systems, though critical reception and commercial performance metrics are not widely archived. The collaboration marked one of Khan’s early forays into intercontinental fusion projects, while Ensemble Gilles Binchois expanded its repertoire beyond its core focus on medieval and Renaissance music. Further contextual details about the recording process, alternate takes, or subsequent live renditions of the track are not publicly verified.