Festival in Pune and home

February 5-February 9

My last adventure for this trip was going to Pune to play at a festival organized there by tabla player Aneesh Pradhan, and his wife, the vocalist Shubha Mudgal. Now in its second year, their Baajaa Gaajaa Festival aims to bring together as many genres of music as possible that are being made in contemporary Indian society. So there is country and urban and pop/rock and experimental music as well as north and south Indian classical. And several ‘videshi’ or foreign musicians; Adrian McNeil on sarode from Australia, and Hiros Nakagawa from Japan on bansuri. Apparently the foreign artists were of some local interest – I had gotten a telephone call from a writer for the Pune edition of the Indian Express newspaper on my last day in Mumbai (how they got my Indian mobile number will always be a mystery), and when I arrived in Pune and got a copy of the paper I found myself the subject of a nearly half-page article, full of things that I had never said to the interviewer.

The festival was held at a large, not-quite-finished shopping mall that had a performance amphitheater, used for the evening concerts. A pair of outdoor stages had been set up in different areas of the mall for a daily series of short performances, of which I was one. I was happy to meet and play with Sandip Bhattacharya from the Netherlands. The evening programs were done in an original and very interesting way. The first night featured Hindustani vocalist Rashid Khan and Karnatic vocalist T.M. Krishnan; but it wasn’t the usual format, where one artists performs first half and the next second half, an you only listen to the part you like/know. And it wasn’t one of those usually wretched forced jugalbandi’s where the artists are supposed to perform together. Instead, the two artists and their accompanist ensembles were on the large stage together. First Rashid presented a piece, short by khyal standards, then TM Krishnan, sang, then back to Rashid, and so on for three rounds. The artists, both top of their class, got to hear what the other did and then react to that. In each round, the musicians used more or less the same set of notes or pitches, but in north or south Indian style. The second evening program featured three vernacular music groups, all on stage together and performing round robin again. They were a woman who sang Bengali songs, but with an electric band that used synthesizers; a traditional qawwali group, and a Rajasthani folk group. Two very different types of urban music and one country or folk music, all very sophisticated in very different ways.

Going to and from Pune and being there was a reminder that even modern India is still a pretty different and unique universe. In spite of the fact that there is now a modern toll expressway covering much on the only 80-90 miles between Mumbai and Pune, the trip still takes 3-4 hours. On the way up, at the insistence of one of the people in the group who had hired the car, we actually stopped at a McDonalds, for coffee and French fries. I had never previously been to a McDonalds in India. Amazingly the fries tasted exactly like they do in the US, as far as I remember (haven’t been to one in the US in maybe 15-20 years I think). Whatever addictive chemical they figured out they have managed to import that into India as well. The hotel I stayed in looked like a pretty modern place, and I think they had good intentions, but almost nothing worked. Tim Witter’s theory is that everything in India happens at about 70%, that they get things about 70% right, and then the other 30% comes in and keeps everything funky. I think in Pune the figure was more like 55%. This new mall being built, where the festival took place, everything was new, but always just a little out of true, haphazard, not quite fitted right.

From Monday morning, February 8th, it was full international travel mode. It can be really fun when you can do it well. I indulged myself by booking a room at a nice hotel, the Orchid, near the airport in Mumbai to wait out that day until my late evening departure. Tim Witter was also heading back to Kolkata late in the afternoon, so it worked out well to hang out for the day in comfort and then head out to our respective airports, actually same airport, same runway, but the domestic and international terminals are about 10 miles apart from each other. In the 4-5 years since I last took an international flight out of Mumbai the international terminal has been transformed from a hellhole into a much better facility than LAX, I regret to say. “Bertha,” my wonderful contact inside Thai Airways, had arranged for me to stay at a hotel in Bangkok during my 14 hour layover there, so the misery of taking a flight that left at 1:00am and landed at 5:00 am was mitigated by having a car waiting to take me to a four star hotel, 5 hours of sleep, a fabulous buffet lunch (I should have taken pictures), a massage and a car back to the airport. The 13-hour nonstop flight back to LA seemed quite painless at that point. Then it was time to unpack the sarode case and give it back to its true occupants (see the last picture). And that was it!