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 22nd 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment