Mumbai - First Week

Outdoor Concert at dawn, St. Xavier's College, January 26th

Flew from Kolkata with Steve Gorn. We then took the taxi to Dadar, left our bags at (tabla player) Prafulla Athalye’s place and walked up the road to the Dadar Matunga Cultural Centre to see Ulhas Kashalkar perform. Steve and I both think he is the finest male vocalist performing today. And he had his “A-team” of accompanists: Suresh Talwalkar on tabla (he has more sheer fun performing than any other player I can think of) and Sudhir Nayak on harmonium (incredibly virtuosic playing, but done in a way that never distracts from the vocal). Since my program was at the same venue the next morning, part of the same Pandit Bhatkande Memorial Festival, I wanted to meet the principal secretary/organizer of the Centre, Pandit Sharad Sathe, as well as see the hall.

After the program Steve and I collected our things and headed south to the Colaba area to the YWCA (yes) where (we thought) we had a room reserved. Instead we got that indescribable sensation of walking up to the desk rather late in the evening, announcing ourselves and having the staff look at us blankly, “who are you?” It turned out that the reservation officer had been answering our emails but not writing the reservation in their book. The Y is still one of those places, very typical in India from days past, where everything (and I mean everything) is recorded in ledgers and journals in long hand. (I still remember banks in Calcutta that I went to in 1979 that had giant ledgers stacked floor to ceiling at the back of the room.) So in an interesting confluence of old and modern technologies Steve and I both pulled out our MacBooks and showed them the emails we had received. They found me a single room so small that I had to leave my sarode case standing upright, and poor Steve had to sleep in one of the offices for the night, but they got us sorted out and I had a great single room there for the next two weeks.

My first program in Mumbai was the next morning (January 23rd), back at the Dadar Matunga Cultural Centre, with Prafulla Athalye (one of Alla Rakha Khansahib’s senior students) on tabla. Bilaskhani Todi and Misra Kafi. Later that afternoon I made it to the NCPA in time to catch the last session of the yearly seminar on music organized by Pandit Arvind Parikh; not so much for the content of the conference truth be told but to pay my respects to Arvind-ji, who has done more than anyone in the last 20 years to keep the Hindustani classical music scene alive in Mumbai. An amazing man, really, now in his 80s, head of maybe the largest transportation and international communications company in India, a very wealthy man, and dedicated to Indian music as a musician, a senior disciple of Ustad Vilayat Khan, and as a patron. Then off to drink beer and eat Mangalore-style seafood with the Dutch contingent (Joep Bor, Wim van der Meer and Frances de Ruiter), Richard Widdess from SOAS, Steve and Jon Barlow. Many thanks again to Professor de Ruiter and the International Musicological Society for picking up the tab at the end of the evening!

Most of the next week was spent practicing and checking out a succession of local restaurants in the Colaba area, from INR 1,000+ fancy places like Indigo to the South Indian veg place a few steps away where a great masala dosa cost about INR 60 (a rupee is currently worth about 2¢). Very happy to make a few trips to Bademiya, the wonderful outdoor kebab place that sets up on a back street behind the Taj hotel every night and runs until about 1:00 am. I used to see or be taken to this barbecue on my first trips to Mumbai, and then not be able to find it again, or I would find it walking around late one night and then lose track again. Now I finally know, so I can always get one of their famous seekh kababs when I want. I took Ty Burhoe, on his first trip to India, figuring that this was an iconic Mumbai destination.

 

January 26th morning, Republic Day, featured a dawn program in the courtyard of St. Xavier’s College by Pandit Shivkumar Sharma, santoor, accompanied on tabla by Yogesh Samsi and Bhawani Shankar on packawaj. It was quite magical and definitely worth getting up at 5:30 for. I finally got to meet up with Ty, and well as meet Takehiro, Shivji’s student from Japan, and Max, another student from Brooklyn. After the program Yogesh invited Ty and I to his wonderful family home in Gamdevi, one of the older sections of Mumbai, for breakfast. Toast with homemade butter still stands out as one of the outstanding food experiences I had on this trip. 

Sea of Vegetables - with pictures

 Some changes I perceived during this last period in Kolkata - actually they are things that don’t seem to be there any more, so I only became aware later on. Mostly sounds - the sounds that used to be very common on the street outside Transit House and other places that I have stayed over the years. The Indian street used to be a kaleidoscope of the sounds, the calls and other signals made by the people who supplied various services or sold things from house to house. Many people have commented that these ways are changing rapidly in the cities, that these traditional practices are fading, but, as with many things, Kolkata has, or had, preserved these ways much more than other metropolitan areas. I still see street-side barbers set up under a tree, and all the street-side food stalls making tea, samosas and chow mein.

But this time I became aware of some sounds missing that I was accustomed to hearing - the sound of the chowkidar, the traditional night watchman for instance. If I was up very early or couldn’t sleep I would here the chowkidar banging his staff on the gates of the houses as he passed by. He wasn’t there to actually catch thieves (miscreants in local parlance), but to let them know someone was around so they would run off. there was a call, a vocalization, of a fruit seller, pineapple I think, that I would always hear, but not this time. I especially will miss the signal of the mattress beater, who would come around from house to house and beat some air into the cotton stuffing commonly used in mattresses, which would get packed down over time. He would twang the taut string of the mattress beating tool he used - sorry I don’t have a picture from some previous trip - in a wonderful triple-time rhythm: 1 - - 1 - - 1 - - 1 2 3 1- - 1 - - 1 - - 1 2 3 1- - 1 2 3 1- - 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 - -, etc., with many variations.

One aspect of an older style of India urban life that does seem to be alive and well into the 21st century is that farmers and sellers still set up their fresh vegetables to sell on the sidewalk, even in the more upscale areas of the city. The area where I have stayed for many years, Lake Market, is a traditional market area, so the sellers who don’t want or maybe can’t deal with having an actual market stall just flood the sidewalks around the market building. One of the important philosophical concepts connected with music in India is the Nada Samudra, the Ocean of Sound or Vibration that surrounds everything. I have always thought of the Lake Market area as the Sabzi Samudra: the Sea of Vegetables.

I haven’t got time right now to figure out how to organize these pictures into an album, so I’m just putting them all at the end of the text.

Programs in Kolkata

To close out my much too brief stay in Kolkata I played programs three days in a row, from Wednesday, January 19th through Friday, the 21st. The Wednesday and Friday programs were in small galleries in South Kolkata. Wednesday was at Studio 21, a gallery that featured some pretty avant-garde kind of stuff, some with collage effects, some with cartoon-like features. This studio had never held a music program before, and we sat in a very small room that held maybe 25 people. Very live sound from the stone walls. I shared this program with Portland-based sitarist Josh Feinberg. The Friday program was at the Weavers Studio Centre for the Arts, which is an offshoot of a project that promotes village-based textile arts. They have a commercial showroom up the street and this gallery space for exhibitions. Weavers has had many music programs and were quite well set up in a very long, narrow room. But things were very fixed in how they were done. When it seemed that everyone would want to sit in the chairs that were furthest back in the room, rather than on the very uncomfortable stools further up we suggested that the stools be moved, and the staff reacted with rigid horror at the thought.

The Studio 21 gig was not one of my better ones – I was having trouble with my nails and it was quite humid in the small room, so of course that was the show that Tejendra Mazumdar, one of the top sarode players in India today, come to see. Oh well… At Weavers Studio I was fortunate to have Bubai (Debopriyo Sarkar), a particularly accomplished and sensitive accompanist, available to accompany me on tabla.

Both of these spaces, particularly Weavers, brought to mind the problem with making a transition to a new model of sustainability for (Indian) classical music in Kolkata. These venues do not have any mechanism to be able to pay artists, and are apparently not interested in creating one. Perhaps because so many music events in Kolkata are unticketed and admit with an invitation card, especially programs giving by the various music circles, the idea that a smart, upscale gallery like Weavers might be able to charge a modest admission fee that could go to the artists is anathema. This is not the case in Mumbai and other places. Unless and until some different paradigm can be devised to give some return to the younger or less renowned artists the structure that has supported the superb classical music scene in Kolkata will continue to crumble.

The gallery programs are the type that I might find myself doing, with minor local variation, almost anywhere in the world these days, from Berlin to Bali. Thursday evening’s program was one those uniquely Indian performance experiences. It took place in Howrah, the city just across the big Hoogly River from Kolkata. Being in Howrah is like suddenly going back 75 years in time, or maybe 75 miles in distance from the relatively modern city reality of Kolkata. Many main roads are narrow lanes with twists and turns; life is all out in the street. It’s something like a giant village. The program was in a meeting hall – a large concrete room, bare floor, with a wooden stage raised about 2 feet at one end. The performance area is just a white sheet put down on the wood. By the end of our one and a half-hour program my left ankle was killing me from being on the wood with no padding. I guess I’m spoiled. LOUD sound system. Many mosquitoes. But a very very warm and appreciative audience – people who know the music and are there to listen. 

The program was set up by a classical vocalist, Biswarup Paul, who lives in Howrah and is the secretary of the Hindustani Classical Music Circle there. We shared the program, which was a new and unique experience. We chose three ragas based the Kafi scale (Western Dorian mode) S R g m P D n S: Kafi, Jog and Bagheshri. In the Kafi section I played an alap, then he sang an alap, then I played a short gat/composition with tabla and he sang a vocal composition. In the Jog we did alap and jor together in dhrupad style and then both did compositions. That was as far as we had “rehearsed,” so the Bageshri we pretty much winged it based on a medium tempo vocal composition. I should explain a little that sharing the program, playing together meant that I was mostly expected to follow along with what he did and to shadow what he sang, but this was MOL what I anticipated working with an older, pretty traditional vocalist. Still, it was definitely an experiment and produced interesting moments for both of us and for the audience. I was quite overwhelmed at the end of the program when I was given a very large commemorative plaque and certificate, with the gesture of course, but also with the concept of what I was going to DO with these items which together would have taken up about 2/3 of my suitcase. I have left them on display at the Bondel Road house for now, and maybe the next time I come I’ll get them packed up ands sent home.