Kolkata to Mumbai - January 26-30

Images posted with this blog entry (in reverse order!): 1) performing at Birla Academy; 2) my new sarode! (in back); 3) Alam at Dover Lane; 4) performance space at Spandan; 5,6) the Spandan location off Park Street; 7,8) in the garage.

On January 22^nd I got the new sarode I ordered from Naba Kumar Kanji. I had talked with him about placing the order two years ago when he made a small scale instrument for me that I like very much. The idea was for him to make an instrument that very closely duplicated all the dimensions of my concert sarode, so that I could pick it up and play it without needing to adjust. He had put aside a piece of teak for me that he would use to make a one-piece instrument. I practiced on the new instrument for 3 days while Naba had my sarode to put on a new skin, and I think it has a lot of potential.

On the 26th I played a program sponsored by Spandan, an art gallery space on Park Street, arranged by and also featuring a very fine vocalist, Koushik Bhattacharjee. The location was very interesting. Park Street is one of the major commercial streets in Kolkata, with fancy hotels and restaurants and shops, so I wondered where this venue would be. Just a block or so east and away from the fancy part of the street, the car pulls into a driveway and then into a “courtyard” of a complex of semi-ruined buildings, looking on the verge of falling down, with a row of shacks lining the open area. The property must have been a grand house back in the day, not sure what or when that day was, with a port-cochere and grand staircases. Spandan rents a set of rooms on the second floor that serves as an exhibition space and a very small performance space. The organization draws a warm and knowledgeable audience. It seemed pretty silly to be using a big sound system in such a small room, but that seems to be what every artist and audience expects. Poking around the property while waiting around, I came upon the wreck of a wonderful old sedan from the 1940s, pre-independence I’m sure. I couldn’t see what kind of car it was. Khansahib and others have told stories about driving all over India in big cars in those days, and I guess it must have been in a car like this one. It seems so far removed from the cars in use today, even the ubiquitous Ambassadors.

Koushik had also invited Arup Sen Gupta and I to do a program at a community center near his home in a district of Howrah called Sankrail, across the river from Kolkata. The iPhone GPS and map showed the area to be a kind of blank space., and it seemed to take nearly forever to get to, following a smaller and smaller road along the shore of the river into the country. The hosts had set up a massive sound system in a very small room, but with more speakers outside, so that everyone in the neighborhood heard all the announcements and the music, whether they wanted to or not. The second half of the program featured a chorus of teen-age girls that Koushik had taught to sing pieces composed in classical ragas like Yaman but using words from popular songs in Bengali. The girls were all dressed in red and white sari costumes, and were clearly overjoyed to be performing. They thought it was a very big deal that these outsiders, including a foreigner, had come to listen to them. Koushik lives and has his school nearby in a village called Andul, in the house where his grandfather lived, and is the third generation of professional musician teaching there. It’s a very charming scene that he has set up for himself, and he smiles all the time with good reason, I think.

My last day in Kolkata was spent dealing with one crisis after another. I had stupidly lost my ATM card by leaving it in the cash machine (!), so I had to arrange to get a large amount of money by other means to pay off the guest house, etc., etc. The I had to figure out whether it would be possible to get the new sarode shipped back to the US and avoid the hassle of taking it to Mumbai and then talking it home as a third piece of checked baggage, dealing with customs, excess baggage charges, etc. I had thought I had that under control, and that I was going to give the sarode to be shipped to the Ali Akbar College at some later time. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the person in Kolkata in charge of arranging shipments to the College was vey obnoxious and totally uncooperative. Naba, the sarode maker, saved the day for me. We could really hardly speak to each other, with our very limited mutual language skills, but he let me know that he had worked with a shipping agent and had had no problems. So I brought the sarode to that agent, and it was great. I paid him somewhat less than it would have cost to keep the sarode with me and take it as baggage, and he took it away and took care of everything. It would have been such a hassle, and instead a got an email from him with a Fedex tracking number and I watched online as my sarode transited Mumbai, then Paris, on to Knoxville, Tennessee and then to Los Angeles. It arrived at my door the same day I did. For a place where things often operate in some very strange and bizarre way, sometimes things in India work amazingly well.

Dover Lane Music Conference, Kolkata

I am determined to finish off my recollections of the trip; my thanks to those who are bearing with my sporadic postings. The remaining week of my stay in Kolkata was a whirlwind of music-related events – concerts I attended and programs of my own, getting a new instrument, a lot of running around. Anyone who has traveled to India knows that getting even simple chores done can turn into a major event, and getting even one thing done in the whole day, like buying something or mailing a letter, can seem like a major accomplishment by the time it’s all over.

The week began with the first of my own formal programs in Kolkata, held in the funky auditorium of the Birla Academy, where I gave my first performance in Kolkata about 20 years ago, and which still has the same ambience (a white sheet thrown onto the old stage) and a screeching, howling sound system. My sincere thanks to sitarist Partha Bose and his students for inviting me to play at their function. I have played well at this venue in the past, that first performance with Samir Chatterjee on tabla, and later in 1995 with Tim Witter, but this was not one of those times. The tabla player was completely unresponsive except when he was bent on running away with the performance, but that’s not the whole story. What are those mysterious factors that sometimes put the world in your hand when you play and then the next day give a big wet slap upside the head? As Khansahib told us many times, this is when you fall back on your training and do the best you can. And people responded positively, which I hope was sincere. I was more appreciative of Steve Gorn’s response – he had just come in to Kolkata that afternoon and had come over to see me play. He just looked at me and said, so, ready to go out for a nice dinner and a couple of beers? Oh, yes.

OK, enough about me. The next few days were a series of high-end concerts – the fabled all-night concerts that seem so enchanting and exotic to music lovers from outside of India. And they are quite amazing, as both musical and social events. My first couple of trips to India I used to stay til the very end at 7-8 in the morning, several nights in a row, and I saw most of the greatest musicians of the late 20^th century. Principal among these festivals is the Dover Lane Music Conference, always held in late January for 4-5 nights in a row. The first night was dedicated to the memory of Ali Akbar Khan and featured 5 sarode performances. The first was my dear friend Anindya Banerjee, perhaps Khansahib’s most devoted student in Kolkata, getting his first chance to perform at this very prestigious festival, playing Kaushi Kanada. He was followed by Khansahib’s grandson, Shiraz, Dhyanesh-da’s son, who lost his father when he was still quite young. He plays left-handed, like his great-grandfather Alauddin Khan, and had not given a major classical music public performance before. Alam had told me that Shiraz had been practicing his piece in Durgeshwari incessantly, starting late at night until dawn.

Alam was certainly the main event of the evening. I think there was great interest in hearing him perform at Dover Lane for the first time since his father’s passing. In my view Alam more than rose to the occasion. His main piece in Bageshri Kanada, alap and jor followed by gat (accompanied by Indranil Mallick, a great young player who I would love to play with) was at a consistently high level and really came to life in a way that I hadn’t heard before. I think Alam really won over the Kolkata audience, talking to them between pieces, asking for their support. His follow-up pieces were in Rag Chandramouki (sp?), a creation of his father’s, and Mahlua Kedar, certainly outside the customary light classical typically played at such a time!

The next night a group of us decided to forgo Dover Lane for one of the all-night programs taking place in one of the suburban towns outside Kolkata, a place called Uttarpara. These are usually really old-school, with a big pandal or tent set up in a field, and attended by the people of the town and area rather than the big city society types. Getting there was quite a sustained ordeal, typically, as the driver of the car we hired had only a very vague idea of where we were intending to go. The GPS function on my iPhone, which worked incredibly well with google maps even out in the Bengal countryside, saved the day, or night, several times, and even showed our destination, the library in ‘downtown’ Uttarpara, on the map! We saw a sarode-sitar duet, or maybe duel, with Tejendra and Shahid Parvez, with Subhankar Banerjee on tabla, followed by the great vocalist Rashid Khan, again with Subhankar on tabla. We had not had any dinner, and there didn’t seem to be too much available at the outdoor concert site other than tea, except for some kind of deep-fried mystery balls that looked just like the thing everyone says you should avoid at all costs in India. In fact, they turned out to be hard-boiled eggs with a spice crust and deep fried, and they were quite good. We had originally intended to hear Alam again, but everything was running extremely late, so after finding him and hanging out to talk for a while, we headed back into the city – it was already almost 3:00 am and we didn’t get back until well after 4.

The 24th night I went back to Dover Lane mostly to hear the two instrumental items on for the evening. First was Baha’uddin Dagar playing rudra bin. I though his choice of Malkauns, a midnight raga, when he was the first item of the evening at 8:00 was kind of strange, but I guess everyone can pretty much do what they want in those settings. He played alap for nearly an hour, which I found a bit excessive for a five note raga, but his jor reminded me of why our instrumental tradition is know as “binkar” meaning coming from the bin. The combination of right-hand bol, chikari and pulse that Dagar played made the connection to this older tradition very clear. Kushal Das is among my favorite current sitar players, so I was anticipating his performance later that evening. He presented a long alap and jor in Darbari Kanada, maybe the grandest of the north Indian ragas and one that Khansahib took very seriously. Kushal gave a great performance, very enjoyable to listen to, but I was immediately aware that his interpretation of the raga was not what I would have wanted to hear. The catch phrases were there but the formal structure that supported them was not, Kushal used many phrases and passages that were out of rag as I have learned it. But, I guess it could be argued, with Khansahib now gone, who is to say what the rag is any more? Is Baba’s “version” now just one among competing interpretations? For me it’s not an issue – his teaching is clear and preserved in many forms, not just in my mind, and his strict version (as opposed to what he would somewhat derisively refer to as “the khyal version” has an immediate and deep power that I’ve never heard from anyone else. But maybe no one in India will be playing the rag that way any more. Perhaps we will now have the “American” school of ragas. I understand that something like this has already taken place in Javanese court gamelan music, where certain very grand and formal styles are rarely or never played in Java any more but are popular and a mainstay of American-based gamelans.

Saraswati Puja

My apologies to any readers out there for falling so far behind. Several nights in a row of going to bed at 4-4:30 am will do that! Saraswati Puja was held on January 20th this year – the fact that the puja would take place during the time I planned to be in Kolkata was one of the factors that influenced by decision to make this trip in the first place. Saraswati is the aspect of the Goddess that supports all forms of learning and the arts; she is the patroness of all musicians and Khansahib taught us to show her honor and devotion even as he did. He used to tell stories of seeing a beautiful woman appear in his father’s music room late at night when his father was playing, who would disappear later – this was the Goddess coming to listen to his father’s music.

The entire idea of a culture that devotes a day every year to celebrate the arts, where the government declares a full day holiday and shops, businesses and offices close, could seem pretty radical to the rest of the relentlessly money-oriented world. Even in the rest of India this day is not celebrated as it is in Bengal. It is one the facets that makes Bengali culture so rich and unique. Almost every street and lane sets up a temporary structure or booth and installs a statue of the Goddess. Some of them are quite fantastic! I observed that there is almost always a music player of some kind left running, even if it’s just film or pop music. Even the street dogs geta blessing with a red mark on their foreheads.

In the morning I went to the homes of two prominent musicians, Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri and Pandit Tejendra Mazumdar, to participate in the actual puja itself, which the priest celebrates in front of the statue or image while guests visit or watch. Afterwards there is a meal offered which is also prasad, blessed by the Goddess. In the evening there are informal performances in the home of almost every musician and I was invited to play at two. The first was held at relatives of the tabla player Subhen Chatterjee, where I played with people sitting almost knee to knee with me and Tim Witter. Whatever those mysterious factors are that determine how programs go, everything seemed to line up and I gave the best performance of the entire trip, in Rag Puriya Dhanashri.