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.

Dhaka 2

The evening of January15th I played at the Dhaka Art Centre, with Arup Sengupta on tabla. The center just opened at the beginning of January and ours was one of the first performances held there. It’s really a gallery space, not an auditorium, so they set up a stage area in the largest and most soundproof room and then set up feeds to speakers in other galleries. We were told over 200 people came, although we only saw 50-60 of them. There were a number of TV cameras there from Bangladesh television stations.

I wanted to see if I could find any video clips taken that night, but when I tried to go to the web site for Desh TV in Bangladesh I was warned that the web site was infected with malware and should not be accessed. Oh well… A reporter for one of the English language dailies (Dhaka has dozens of daily papers in Bengali and English) did send me a link to the article he posted for his paper, the New Age:

http://www.newagebd.com/2010/jan/17/time.html

For me the important thing was that I got a chance to go to the country of Khansahib’s birth and present a program in his honor. This has been my motivation for making this trip all along, and what I have tried to convey wherever I have been. I was very happy that the program was attended by Shahadat Hossain Khan, who I believe is the senior relative of Khansahib’s family in Bangladesh now. Shahadat is the grandson on Ayet Ali Khan, the younger brother of Khansahib’s father Alauddin Khan. Ayet Ali built the prototype sarode that Khansahib played all his music on, the basis for the incredible sound he achieved.

Dhaka 1

Lecture-demo the morning of January 15^th for an organization called Chhayanaut in Dhaka. They have an amazing story - promoting performance first of Rabindra Sangeet, the music composed by Rabindranath Tagore, starting back in 1962. This was and is a political statement of ecumenical secularism here in Islamic Bangladesh. Now they have built up a school with hundreds of students, classical vocal as well as Bengali music, a magnificent new building that apparently took many years to arrange and fund. But they have no instrumental music program. After playing I was asked what might be done to promote more interest in instrumental music. I talked about the connection of East Bengal with the instrumental music gharanas, that so many maestros like Ali Akbar Khan and Allaudin Khan were born here, that the patronage given by the rich landowners in the late 19^th/early 20^th centuries was critical to all the sarode and sitar gharanas that came out of Kolkata later. I tried to suggest that if they can construct an integrated view of the history of the past century, not an easy thing to do in light of all the upheavals, then perhaps the younger generation would see that there is a heritage worth investing themselves in.

Delhi

Writing from Dhaka in Bangladesh. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been in South Asia for barely over a week - it seems like I’ve been here many weeks. The program last Friday night at the Habitat Centre in Delhi was my first of the trip. “People enjoyed it,” which is code among musicians maybe everywhere for “I wasn’t particularly happy with how it went, but it’s over and time to move on.” And apparently people really did enjoy it. While I was walking around the fabulous Hamayun’s Tomb archeological site, a group of about 5 people stopped me and told me that they had heard me play the night before and how much they liked the music. So…

Hamayun’s Tomb is practically worth a trip to Delhi just to see it. It was built about 75 years before the Taj Mahal and is considered the model for the Taj. It was also very quite and peaceful, until about 2:30 when hundreds of teenage schoolchildren arrived. Also the best weather, warm, relatively sunny, the only real break from cold and fog. Delhi is in the middle of tearing itself apart and rebuilding, especially miles of elevated metro trains. It could really transform the city if they get them finished and if they don’t fall down because of construction errors. Otherwise traffic is pretty hopeless. It’s like LA; everything is an hour or more from where you are, unless it’s after 10 at night or a Sunday. Between distance and cold it seems like all programs are lightly attended. I was told by musicians who live in the city that our attendance of around 25-30 people on Friday was actually very good. Certainly the publicity was good! Among those who attended were two people I hadn’t seen for years, who had no knowledge that I was in India but saw the listing in the newspapers.

On Sunday Tim Witter and I went to see the sarode jugalbandi of Aashish and Alam Khan, with Swapan Chaudhuri on tabla. The program had been set up as part of the Tansen/Swami Haridas Festival by Vinay Bharat Ram, a long-time patron of classical music in Delhi and supporter of Khansahib for many years. I stayed at his family compound back on my first trip to India in 1979 when traveling with Khansahib and Zakir, and was completely blown away. Alap in Bageshri, gat in Bageshri Kanada, second piece in Misra Mand. The program had clearly been set up for Alam to take the lead, playing the opening statements in the alap, jor and gats; a very generous gesture on Aashish’s part, I thought. And Alam carried it off seemingly effortlessly; his playing had a very good flow. Pandit Ravi Shankar came to the program. I wonder if it was his first time hearing Alam play solo. I sat behind him and watched him watch/listen to Alam. I think he was pretty knocked out!

Hemen Sen

A very sad piece of recent news is the passing of Hemen Sen, the premier sarode builder of the twentieth century. We all called him Hemen-Babu, a term of respect, and in a way his passing is in symmetry with Khansahib’s; Hemen provided the instruments that Khansahib taught his students to play. I don’t think he knew his age for certain, but he was probably in his late 80s. I was hoping very much that I would have another chance to walk by his tiny shop on Rashbehari Avenue, stop to say hello, and be invited for a glass of tea and a biscuit, a ritual that I always looked forward to no matter how many times repeated. He made some beautiful instruments for me, and I got to sit and watch as he completed the final stages of adjustment; then I would tune the instrument and play something for him, in the midst of the shattering traffic noise of Rashbehari Avenue, and he would work some more.

I was fortunate that he gave me an in-depth interview for my dissertation research in 1994; I don’t think he had been asked before. He told me a wonderful story regarding how he came to have his “position” as sarode maker for the Maihar Gharana. After getting some training in building instruments in East Bengal, he moved to Calcutta and looked for an opportunity. As a craftsman from a village background he was not at all a part of the middle-class concert going society of 1950s Calcutta. He told me that sometime in the mid-1950s he had a chance to see Alauddin Khansahib perform on sarode at a big outdoor venue, with thousands of people, and that he was far away in the back of the crowd. Never having seen or heard a sarode, and based on what he could observe from where he stood, he went back to his shop after that performance and built a sarode. He had never even seen the back of a sarode! He then found out where Alauddin Khan lived, brought the sarode there, and requested that the great maestro please examine his work and give his critique. Perhaps partially because Hemen was from Comilla, Alauddin Khan’s native district on East Bengal, he got his audience, and the maestro’s respect for his initiative. According to Hemen, Alauddin Khan told him that he had been hired to teach instrumental music at the Marris College in Lucknow, and he would need to order a number of sarodes for the students there, and Hemen got the commission.

I also had the opportunity to learn about Bengali life and culture from his narrative. When I interviewed Hemen about his background, his answer was translated on the spot as “I came from a small village.” When I later had my tape of the interview transcribed in detail, Hemen’s answer was transformed into, “I came from a village so small that everyone knew what kind of fish you had for lunch.”