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 20th 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.
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