Dhaka 2

The evening of January15th I played at the Dhaka Art Centre, with Arup Sengupta on tabla. The center just opened at the beginning of January and ours was one of the first performances held there. It’s really a gallery space, not an auditorium, so they set up a stage area in the largest and most soundproof room and then set up feeds to speakers in other galleries. We were told over 200 people came, although we only saw 50-60 of them. There were a number of TV cameras there from Bangladesh television stations.

I wanted to see if I could find any video clips taken that night, but when I tried to go to the web site for Desh TV in Bangladesh I was warned that the web site was infected with malware and should not be accessed. Oh well… A reporter for one of the English language dailies (Dhaka has dozens of daily papers in Bengali and English) did send me a link to the article he posted for his paper, the New Age:

http://www.newagebd.com/2010/jan/17/time.html

For me the important thing was that I got a chance to go to the country of Khansahib’s birth and present a program in his honor. This has been my motivation for making this trip all along, and what I have tried to convey wherever I have been. I was very happy that the program was attended by Shahadat Hossain Khan, who I believe is the senior relative of Khansahib’s family in Bangladesh now. Shahadat is the grandson on Ayet Ali Khan, the younger brother of Khansahib’s father Alauddin Khan. Ayet Ali built the prototype sarode that Khansahib played all his music on, the basis for the incredible sound he achieved.

Dhaka 1

Lecture-demo the morning of January 15^th for an organization called Chhayanaut in Dhaka. They have an amazing story - promoting performance first of Rabindra Sangeet, the music composed by Rabindranath Tagore, starting back in 1962. This was and is a political statement of ecumenical secularism here in Islamic Bangladesh. Now they have built up a school with hundreds of students, classical vocal as well as Bengali music, a magnificent new building that apparently took many years to arrange and fund. But they have no instrumental music program. After playing I was asked what might be done to promote more interest in instrumental music. I talked about the connection of East Bengal with the instrumental music gharanas, that so many maestros like Ali Akbar Khan and Allaudin Khan were born here, that the patronage given by the rich landowners in the late 19^th/early 20^th centuries was critical to all the sarode and sitar gharanas that came out of Kolkata later. I tried to suggest that if they can construct an integrated view of the history of the past century, not an easy thing to do in light of all the upheavals, then perhaps the younger generation would see that there is a heritage worth investing themselves in.

Delhi

Writing from Dhaka in Bangladesh. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been in South Asia for barely over a week - it seems like I’ve been here many weeks. The program last Friday night at the Habitat Centre in Delhi was my first of the trip. “People enjoyed it,” which is code among musicians maybe everywhere for “I wasn’t particularly happy with how it went, but it’s over and time to move on.” And apparently people really did enjoy it. While I was walking around the fabulous Hamayun’s Tomb archeological site, a group of about 5 people stopped me and told me that they had heard me play the night before and how much they liked the music. So…

Hamayun’s Tomb is practically worth a trip to Delhi just to see it. It was built about 75 years before the Taj Mahal and is considered the model for the Taj. It was also very quite and peaceful, until about 2:30 when hundreds of teenage schoolchildren arrived. Also the best weather, warm, relatively sunny, the only real break from cold and fog. Delhi is in the middle of tearing itself apart and rebuilding, especially miles of elevated metro trains. It could really transform the city if they get them finished and if they don’t fall down because of construction errors. Otherwise traffic is pretty hopeless. It’s like LA; everything is an hour or more from where you are, unless it’s after 10 at night or a Sunday. Between distance and cold it seems like all programs are lightly attended. I was told by musicians who live in the city that our attendance of around 25-30 people on Friday was actually very good. Certainly the publicity was good! Among those who attended were two people I hadn’t seen for years, who had no knowledge that I was in India but saw the listing in the newspapers.

On Sunday Tim Witter and I went to see the sarode jugalbandi of Aashish and Alam Khan, with Swapan Chaudhuri on tabla. The program had been set up as part of the Tansen/Swami Haridas Festival by Vinay Bharat Ram, a long-time patron of classical music in Delhi and supporter of Khansahib for many years. I stayed at his family compound back on my first trip to India in 1979 when traveling with Khansahib and Zakir, and was completely blown away. Alap in Bageshri, gat in Bageshri Kanada, second piece in Misra Mand. The program had clearly been set up for Alam to take the lead, playing the opening statements in the alap, jor and gats; a very generous gesture on Aashish’s part, I thought. And Alam carried it off seemingly effortlessly; his playing had a very good flow. Pandit Ravi Shankar came to the program. I wonder if it was his first time hearing Alam play solo. I sat behind him and watched him watch/listen to Alam. I think he was pretty knocked out!

Hemen Sen

A very sad piece of recent news is the passing of Hemen Sen, the premier sarode builder of the twentieth century. We all called him Hemen-Babu, a term of respect, and in a way his passing is in symmetry with Khansahib’s; Hemen provided the instruments that Khansahib taught his students to play. I don’t think he knew his age for certain, but he was probably in his late 80s. I was hoping very much that I would have another chance to walk by his tiny shop on Rashbehari Avenue, stop to say hello, and be invited for a glass of tea and a biscuit, a ritual that I always looked forward to no matter how many times repeated. He made some beautiful instruments for me, and I got to sit and watch as he completed the final stages of adjustment; then I would tune the instrument and play something for him, in the midst of the shattering traffic noise of Rashbehari Avenue, and he would work some more.

I was fortunate that he gave me an in-depth interview for my dissertation research in 1994; I don’t think he had been asked before. He told me a wonderful story regarding how he came to have his “position” as sarode maker for the Maihar Gharana. After getting some training in building instruments in East Bengal, he moved to Calcutta and looked for an opportunity. As a craftsman from a village background he was not at all a part of the middle-class concert going society of 1950s Calcutta. He told me that sometime in the mid-1950s he had a chance to see Alauddin Khansahib perform on sarode at a big outdoor venue, with thousands of people, and that he was far away in the back of the crowd. Never having seen or heard a sarode, and based on what he could observe from where he stood, he went back to his shop after that performance and built a sarode. He had never even seen the back of a sarode! He then found out where Alauddin Khan lived, brought the sarode there, and requested that the great maestro please examine his work and give his critique. Perhaps partially because Hemen was from Comilla, Alauddin Khan’s native district on East Bengal, he got his audience, and the maestro’s respect for his initiative. According to Hemen, Alauddin Khan told him that he had been hired to teach instrumental music at the Marris College in Lucknow, and he would need to order a number of sarodes for the students there, and Hemen got the commission.

I also had the opportunity to learn about Bengali life and culture from his narrative. When I interviewed Hemen about his background, his answer was translated on the spot as “I came from a small village.” When I later had my tape of the interview transcribed in detail, Hemen’s answer was transformed into, “I came from a village so small that everyone knew what kind of fish you had for lunch.”

Another World

Getting my feet wet in this new world….

Nothing of real significance to report, so I’ll keep it brief, post it, and see what it looks like. The flight, nonstop from LA to Bangkok, was quite tolerable, given that it was 18 hours long. But I think it was easier without layovers, waits, delays, etc. that can all come up when there’s a break in the flight. I’ll mention only one thing I observed on the flight – one of the movie choices was the Michael Jackson concert film, This Is It. I intended to just check it out, but I found it surprisingly affecting, watching the working process of an amazing artist, no matter how strange he may have been. A movie of a finished concert would not have held my interest, but this had really beautiful moments.

The taxi ride into Bangkok on a Sunday morning was a reminder that I will see little in the way of clear skies for the next 6 weeks. But this hotel (the Swissotel Nai Lert Park) is an amazing haven from the city around it. Yesterday I left Bangkok to spend 3 hours in Pandora, 3-D and all. I’m totally blown away by the experience of seeing this movie. I’m inclined to agree with the critics who speculate that this film will have a place similar to The Jazz Singer in 1928. One interesting effect of seeing the movie in Bangkok was that when the Pandorans speak to each other, the subtitled translation was in Thai, which might as well be Pandoran for me.

Enough for now, the flight to Kolkata leaves this evening, and then things really begin.