Nitin Sawhney is helping Will Young write songs for his next album.

This can't be right.

Nitin Sawhney is a musical wizard a man unafraid to throw everything from trip-hop to R 'n' B to Indian classical into his musical cauldron and watch in satisfaction as the inflammatory mixture blows convention to smithereens.

Will Young, on the other hand, won Pop Idol. All right, so he has a lovely jazz voice and he looks proper tasty in a gangster hat and spats, but he still started his career on one of the most cynical, exploitative, plastic pop reality TV shows ever created.

So what has Nitin Sawhney got to say for himself, and why is he collaborating with Mr Young?

"He's a very nice bloke," Nitin says. "He called me up and came around, and I sat down and did a few things with him.

"I think he's a very good singer and a really nice guy. I don't think he came through that Pop Idol thing in a cheesy way. I think he's tried to better himself as a singer and musician, and he's very hardworking. I respect that."

There are a few adjectives in there that have been applied to Nitin himself in the past especially that most blandly damning of words, 'nice'. Perhaps that's what this unlikely pair have in common.

Nitin's music shouldn't be nice. Fusing so many different styles and cultures, it should be bold, beautiful, innovative, groundbreaking.

It has been called all that and more, but reviewers have also suggested that his albums are, occasionally, less than the sum of their parts. The eclecticism for which he is famous, combined with smooth production, sometimes dilutes the strength of the musical ingredients.

Yet what Nitin has worked at and pushed for and achieved over the past ten years has contributed to a quiet revolution.

When he started making his mark, there was a very limited British marketplace for Asian music. "Instead of going straight into music I started off doing law, and then I did accountancy," he says.

"At that time there wasn't any precedent for Asian musicians to earn money making music, so even though I'd been playing since I was five I used accountancy to support myself.

"It was hard to get any kind of interest so I couldn't just launch myself as a musician, which I think was good, in a way.

"If you go straight in you often have to sell out and do a lot of stuff you hate before you can do what you want. I was always quite lucky. I could play for the love of it and not because I had to."

Ten years on, the Asian arts have not just made an impact on mainstream British culture, they're big bucks. Monsoon Wedding, Bride and Prejudice, Bombay Dreams British audiences can't get enough of Bollywood dazzle.

It's not just showstopping exotic razzamatazz that's popular, either. Stories that first-generation Asian immigrants couldn't tell are being told by their children and grandchildren in productions like Bend It Like Beckham, East Is East and even Goodness Gracious Me (which Nitin had a hand in).

Granny Sushila from The Kumars at No 42 is now as familiar an old fart as Alf Garnett or Victor Meldrew.

Musicians like Sawhney and Talvin Singh, and dancers like Akhram Khan, have forged connections between traditional modes of expression Kathak dance, Sufi song, instruments like the sitar and tabla and modern beats, hip-hop, or contemporary dance, creating work that isn't so much a fusion of cultures as a whole new creative galaxy.

The giant leaps made in recent years are being reversed, however, by the shadow of Islamic fundamentalism.

"Things have gone backwards with all this Blunkett, Blair, Bush rubbish," says Nitin.

"There's been a rise in racism across Europe I was watching something on television with this guy from a Belgian political party that has about 25 per cent of the vote talking about Islam, saying 'It's not just that our culture is different to theirs ours is actually superior'.

"It means that probably a lot of young Asian people will have problems trying to integrate because of the paranoia and ignorance. People really need to chill out a bit."

When critics accuse Nitin of niceness, perhaps this is what they mean. Using music to get people to chill out and come together in harmony is never going to result in rough edges.

He's currently in the studio working on a new album. "It's called Philtre, like the magic potion," he says.

" At the moment I think the world's in a pretty bad mess and I can't see much point writing about it. So I'm focusing on the healing power of music.

"Music reaches out to all those prejudices it's an egalitarian forum. That's why I like working with an orchestra. It's democratic

people expressing a collaborative message."

The Brighton Dome concert with the Britten Sinfonia will be the first time Nitin performs his own work live with an orchestra, including a piece specially comissioned by the Sinfonia.

However, he has worked with classical musicians many times before. A classical pianist and flamenco guitarist himself, he was first commissioned by the Sinfonia to write for them in 2001. At ease with all styles of genres, he's a true musical polymath.

He despairs of the music industry's targeted marketing strategies in which advertisers aiming to please specific brackets of the population end up perpetuating the divisions between them. If you're twelve and a girl, you must like Britney Spears nobody bothers trying to sell you classical music, so you never hear any:

"I think categorisation of music is very much about promoting ignorance and laziness,"

says Nitin. "It's not understanding the world around you."

"It can actually be quite racist. There's a lot of apartheid in record shops if you don't understand it or it sounds foreign you just stick it in the World Music section."

It's this attitude that means Nitin is happy working with Will Young (who, if push comes to shove, is probably more talented than fellow coffee-table musician Jamie 'slightly less interesting than a piece of toast' Cullum) as well as with a classical orchestra.

The hell with street cred. If accountancy will pay for his music-making, he'll do it. If he thinks a Pop Idol winner is a hardworking musician, he'll write songs with him.

He's scored adverts for Nike as well as countless films, produced an album for Cirque du Soleil,and is patron of the Raindance East Film festival and the Government's Access-to-Music program, which brings music education programs to inner-city children.

There's no getting away from it, then Nitin Sawhney is nice. Some of his music is quite nice, too.

Some of it, on the other hand, is rare, lovely, brave and intricately constructed and it will remain that way no matter how many Nike adverts he scores.

Starts 8pm, tickets cost £18 / £15. Call 01273 709 709.