I was born in New York City.
As a toddler I was observed expressing my fascination with music
by peeing on revolving phonograph records. My interest in world
music was born at the age of five when I I fell in love with
a Russian balalaika. I used to invent melodies on my balalaika
and also fooled around on the piano at home. When I was seven
I was sent for piano lessons to an elderly witch who threatened
to rap my knuckles with her ruler if I made a mistake. I went
home and announced definitively that I didn't like the piano.
I fell in love with the banjo when I was nine hearing it played
beside campfires at beach parties on Cape Cod. I went for banjo
lessons at a local music school. An old-timer jazz man taught
me millions of chord progressions for old standards on the tenor
banjo. Something seemed not quite right. After a few months I
realized that this guy was never going to teach me frailing or
Scruggs-picking because these styles didn't exist on the tenor
banjo. The instrument which had won my heart was in fact the five-string
banjo which has
a continuously ringing drone string, a premonition of the essential
drone of Indian music. Harmony was never my thing. So I started
taking lessons and devouring teach-yourself books, learning both
"old-timey" banjo styles and the flashier speedy rolls
of bluegrass banjo. I started playing the guitar when I was eleven,
and used it to accompany a large body of American folk songs which
congregated in my memory. I had a particular affection for union
songs although I had no idea what a union was.
My first real guru was the
celebrated blind blues singer Reverend Gary Daviswho
I went to for guitar lessons when I was sixteen. He taught me
many of his beautiful ragtime and blues numbers in the two-finger
picking style for which he was famous. We sat in a basement in
Queens an armchairs which swallowed you up. He had a number ten
tin can around the back of his chair which answered to all his
bodily needs. Mrs. Davis used to bring us lemonade. After a couple
of hours the Reverand would say it was time to feed Miss Gibson
- by aiming a five dollar bill for his guitar's sound hole.
As a teenager I started
listening a lot to Indian music. The big turn on was the incredible
energy of Ali Akbar Khan's sarod playing - particularly the jhala..
My first record of Indian vocal music was Rag Madhuvanti by Nazakat
and Salamat Ali. Both the music and the cover photograph suggested
that these people and their music came from outer space. I'd dever
heard anything so profoundly and compellingly other-worldly. There
was an element of humour in the attraction. I'm reminded of this
when confronted with the reactions of unexposed Westerners to
the gamaks of Indian vocal music i.e. "is that guy serious?"
Years later when I was practising singing on the outskirts of
Benares, little children walking past my house on their way home
from school used to giggle and imitate the noises I was making.
But the music grows on you. Its meaning for me resided increasingly
in the mystical overtones of the peaceful spaces and contemplative
tones of alap. I first heard Ram Narain's record The Voice of
a Hundred Colourswhen I was sixteen. The sarangi's appeal lay
in the incredible roundness of its tone and, initially, in being
apparently even more elusive, abstractly defined, and ethereal
than other Indian music. Later I would come to undersand and appreciate
the sensuality of the sarangi as well as something of the intellectual
richness of Indian music.
My first instrument with
south Asian associations was an Afghani sarinda. The sarinda family
of instruments is similar to sarangi in that it is bowed and has
sympathetic strings, but it was a distincly different - skull-like
- shape, a swollen belly. During my one year at Reed College in
Portland, Oregon, I regularly jammed with a group of friends,
mixing old-timey, jazz, and Eastern influences and instruments.
At this time I was also playing electric guitar, enjoying loudness for its own
sake. In 1970 I was in a bad car crash on Route 66 in Oklahoma.
The insurance money was enough for a ticket to India, and in the
autumn of that year I arrived in Delhi in search of a sarangi
teacher. I had just seen my first sarangi in the Golden Temple
in Amritsar and had been shocked by its apparent crudeness and
by the tangled confusion of strings everywhere.
When I started learning
sarangi, I was aware of its reputation for being the most difficult
Indian instrument. To some extent the challenge had attracted
me. I did not at that time realize that sarangi is famously and
infamously the dark sheep of Indian music. I had no idea that
from the point of view of many an Indian bystander there was a
perplexing incongruity in the phenomenon of a priveleged outsider
taking up an instrument which is stigmatized by its association
with the courtesan tradition and the low musical and social status
of its players.
Ustad Sabri Khan , still today one of the most expert sarangi players
of India, found me a sarangi and started me off on rag Bhairav
with a song in Jhaptal often taught in Muslim sarangi families:
'Allah hi Allah' . I was intrigued and excited by the andulan
( broad oscillation of pitch) on the note Dha. Sabri Khan taught
me several bandishes in various rags, usually while shaving or
attending to some other work. He never tought by demonstration
with his own sarangi. I lived in a barsati (a one room flat on
the roof) in West Patel Nagar, a dreary middle class area of Delhi,
a spine-wrenching auto rickshaw ride to Sabri Khan's place in
the medieval Mohallah Niyerian area behind Old Delhi's infamous
GB Road. I practised like crazy, enjoying the swollen lumps on
the back of my fingers, and supplemented my visits to Sabri Khan
with vocal lesson's at Vinai Chandra's Gandharva Mahavidyalay.
Vinai Chandra eventually suggested that I try contacting Gopal
Mishra who was famous
both for his beautiful sarangi playing and for his huge heart
and enthusiasm for intoxicants.
Gopal Mishra tought me with
great seriousness and warmth. I changed to the Benares fingering
of Sarangi, and he taught me 'sumirana kara mana Rama nama ko'
in rag Puriya Dhanashri, with a systematic selection of layakari
and tihais based on the melody of the bandish. There was a tabla
player-cum-interpreter at each lesson. I felt enormous love for
Gopal-ji and was very inspired by his music and by his dedication.
Every evening, he would go out to a room which was reserved for
his practice in another building in Swatantra Bharat Mills' Colony,
where he lived. The owner of Swatantra Bharat Mills, Vinay Bharat
Ram, was an amateur singer who patronised Gopal Mishra. In the
music room he would play with a tabla accompanist for several
hours each evening, often staring into my eyes - in awe of his
own sublime music. Gopal-ji was a profoundly life-positive musician.
He was also a tormented man, and the clash between his own love
for life and music and the conservative forces around him eventually
claimed his life via the avenue of excessive drinking. He remains
very close to my heart.
I couldn't handle the hustle
and bustle of living in Delhi. In the autumn of 1971 I shifted
to the more romantic and infinitely crazier setting of Benares.
I lived in the country about four miles from Benares and bicycled
in to lessons at the home of Gopal Maharaj (yes another Gopal!), a young sarangi player who
was very warm and informal but neither an outstanding musician
nor a focused teacher. I saw something of the life of music in
the kotas of Dalmandi where he was employed teaching girls to
sing.
After a few months I moved
into the town of Benares and began learning or trying to learn
from Gopal-ji's brother Hanuman Prasad Mishra. In musical terms this was a tremendous mistake.
He tought me very little during the three years I lived in Benares:
six songs. And the Benares fingering, well-suited to the delicate
runs and graces of thumri (light-classical music - the specialty
of Benares), is a disadvantage for executing the tans (fast passages)
of khyal, the main contemporary form of North Indian vocal art
music. I did not make much progress musically but what an experience
of Benarsi life! Many years later I understood how fortunate I
had been to spend so many days in Hanuman ji's house partaking
in his very forminable rustic ambience. Joep Bor described him
as "the grand old man of the sarangi". His repertoire
and style embody all the luscious graces of Benares music. According
to Hanuman-ji music is about "swar ko pyaar karna"-
loving the notes.
During this period in Benares
I also studied with Amiya Bhattacharya, a Bengali gentleman who was a surbahar player
and vocalist, a student of Ashik Ali Khan, the Ustad (teacher)
of Mustaq Ali Khan, the famous old-style sitarist of Benares.
Amiya Babu was a professional teacher. Every student payed ten
rupies a lesson, and he taught for the durationion of the allotted
time for a lesson. This was a welcome antidote to the hours of
waiting and running errands for Hanuman. Amiya Babu's interest
and strength lay in alap, the systematic, un-metered systematic
exploration of a rag's tonal material. He sang and usually I repeated
each phrase singing.
In 1973 I met Durga
Prasad Mishra who
was known as Pande Maharaj, the brother of the famous dancers
Sitara Devi and Alekananda Devi. He was introduced to me as being
a sort of musical tantric, and indeed his singing was delivered
with such powerful emotion that it seemed to come from some magic
realm. He sang for hours on end while I accompanied him, very
imperfectly, on the sarangi. Whenever I tried to stop to stretch
my legs, he would scream "bajaao, jor se bajaao!" Play,
play with energy! Pande Maharaj often cried while he sang. He
taught me, often emploringly, to open my heart - in my playing
and in life.
My final teacher in this
list of extraordinary pedagogic promiscuity was Mahant-ji Amar
Nath Mishra who
was the mahant of the Sankat Mochan Temple in Benares, a great
guru of wrestling, and an outstanding pakawaj player. He had roughly
a thousand wrestling disciples and he was very much in demand
by both Dagars and Darbanga dhrupad singers for his sensitive
accompaniment. I learned dhrupad singing from him for a few months.
I used to walk along the bank of the Ganga every morning with
my giant tambura over my shoulder and meet Mahant-ji in a small
room in the Tulsi Ghat temple. Mostly we worked on a dhrupad in
Rag Alaihya Bilaval.
I did it wrong. Either I
wasn't satisfied with my teachers or they didn't quench my thirst
for the sort of musical experience - transmission - that I expected
to have. Anyone will tell you that the best thing is to stick
with one teacher through thick and thin. Mutual sympathy and trust
need time to develop. I touched a lot of feet, but I wasn't somehow
content with touching the same pare of feet forever. On the other
hand: I had the opportunity to share in the lives of some extraordinary
human beings, to hear a lot of incredible music, and to progress,
albeit in a somewhat helter-skelter way, in my sarangi playing.
I settled down in Wales
in the end of 1974. I made two trips to India between 1978 and
1980, staying in Delhi for around two years. I studied for this
entire period with the veteran singer and musicologist Pandit
Dilip Chandra Vedi
in Delhi. Vedi-ji had a gift for encapsulating the essential grammar
of rags in concise memorised sequences of alap. His barhat was
systematic but imaginative. I am deeply grateful to Vedi-ji for
teaching me what a rag is: what sorts of restraints one needs
to be on the lookout for when trying to come to grips with a new
rag. During this period I also studied dhrupad singing with Ustad
Fayazuddin Dagar, working microscopically on intonation.
I started to perform and
teach in London in 1981. My first gig was accompanying the world-famous
tabla maestro Ustad All Rakha Khan. My next was a tour with the
late Latif Ahmed Khan, a great tabla player of the Delhi Gharana.
I accompanied many Indian singers and dancers including Ustad
Salamat Ali Khan, Ustad Mohammed Sayeed Khan, M.R. Gautam, Shrimati
Maya Sen, Gitanjali, Pratap Pawar, and Nahid Siddiqi.
Much of my livlihood came
from frequent solo concerts with Live Music Now, an organization
founded by Sir Yehudi Menuhin with the aim of bringing art music
to the community. This was very enriching work: playing for mentally
and physically handicapped children, blind people, and elderly
people, as well as in bizarre venues such as the National Garden
festival ( we played in the hothouse) and a gathering of the Conservative
party (we played beside the hors d'oeuvres table).
During this period I had
many solo performances on television, and played for films, theatre,
and television productions including The Jewel in the Crown ,
The Razor's Edge, The Last Viceroy, End of Empire, The Bengal
Lancer, and The Little Buddha. In films sarangi is usually used
for tragic scenes: a village stricken by cholera, a baby bitten
by a scorpion, Gandhiji's assassination. But the sarangi can be
cheerful also!
I taught Indian singing
at Open University summer schools, conducted intensive introductory
workshops
on Indian singing, and had a few private students. At the same
time I was becoming immersed in music technology, reacquainting
myself with my electric guitar and producing a novel hybrid music
which was characterised by some listeners as "Indo-punk".
I tended to play all the instruments myself, not being able to
find knowledgable Indian musicians who were excited by rock, or
rock musicians who knew rag and tal, to which my new crazy music
strictly adhered. I recorded from time to time with pop musicians
such as George Harrison, Blancmange, and Voice of the Beehive
and performed and recorded with the Sons of Arqa.
While devoting a vast amount
of energy to trying to achieve "authenticity" - cultural
correctness - in my sarangi playing, I've always needed to counterbalance
this often frustrating endeavour with wild activity of some kind
or another. I used to go busking from time to time with an Indian
marrionette named Lakshmi
whom I created in 1979 in Wales. She's about two feet high and hangs
in front of me from a system of poles which is harnessed
to my back. Many bells adorn my ankles , clanging while the two
of us dance and I play the sarangi. An amplifier hangs from my
neck, there's a snake named Shiva who comes out of a basket when
I reel in my fishing reel, and there's a transistorised car with
a soup can on top that goes around to collect the money. People
in Italy loved the car. I used to play a three minute song and
then send the car around for twenty minutes. My busking act brings
Indian art music to the people. People warm to Indian music and
have a laugh; I get fresh air, exercise, sometimes a suntan, meet
lots of people, and make lots of money. A stark contrast from
the proprieties of an Indian concert in the diaspora.
My enthusiasm for the roots
of the sarangi tradition was rekindled at the historic Bhopal
Sarangi Mela of1989.
In 1992 I completed an MMus degree in Ethnomusicology at SOAS.
My dissertation was a detailed analysis of a performance of khyal
by Niaz Ahmed Khan which contrasted emic and etic, insider's'and
outsiders' conceptions of the music.The Barhat Tree , a paper
derived from this thesis, was published in Asian Music, Volume
XXVIII-2, 1997 (The Journal of the Society for Asian Music).
In the autumn of 1993 I
studied with the world famous master sarangi player Ustad
Sultan Khan. He
taught me an impressive body of tans in rag Marva as a vehicle
for imbibing his vigorous technique.
Since 1993 I have been doing
doctoral research on sarangi style. In the course of the last
five years, I spent two and a half years in India meeting sarangi
players, learning from them, and recording and videoing them playing
- usually in their homes. This has resulted in a unique video
archive of 450 hours of sarangi playing and sarangi life. My fieldwork
began in Benares where I studied with Pandit Baccha
Lal Mishra and Zakan
Kkan two fine players
- especially of purav ang thumri, the sensuous "light classical"
music of Benares. I then spent a few months of 1994 with Ustad
Ghulam
Sabir Qadri, a very
wholesome old-timer from Moradabad, now living in Delhi, on the
other side of the Yamuna river, who welcomed me warmly and taught
me exciting new types of tans as well as the austere old-style
'jor ang' of sarangi.
In the autumn of 1994 I
went to Bhopal and became the disciple of Ustad Abdul Latif
Khan, one of the
greatest living sarangi players. I lived in Bhopal for several
months and returned there periodiacally during my sarangi travels
from one Indian city to another. Abdul Latif Khan is my true Ustad.
We harmonized from the first moment we met. When I first went
to his house in Bhopal, his 13-rear old grandson Sarwar
Hussain told me
that Ustad was away in Gwalior for two weeks but that he also
played, and he invited me to come in and sit down. So I spent
two weeks practicing with and learning Ustad's style from this
brilliant 13-year-old. In my first few months in Bhopal Ustad
taught me 65 rags and transformed my technique. Generally, when
in Bhopal, I spend three hours every morning and every evening
at his house, mostly playing. His teaching usually consists of
simply playing rags in his uniquely clean and delicate style.
He leaves spaces after phrases so that I and/or Sarwar can repeat.
He talks very little. I am treated like and feel like a part of
his wonderful family. Nowadays Ustad takes a walk by the lake
in Bhopal every morning around six, and when I'm there I often
accompany him. He is a real musical father, and my gratitude to
him is enormous.
In the beginning of 1996
I studied singing in Bombay with Batuk Diwanji, a retired public prosecutor with
a huge repertoire of khyals and thumris. (lineage to come). Batuk-ji
is a true gentleman musician. He taught me several beautiful compositions,
and treated me with enormous respect and hospitality.
In the summer of 1997 I
had the good fortune to meet Ustad Mohammed Ali Khan, a uniquely knowledgeble musician. He plays the
sursagar. a bizarre king-size sarangi with extra swarmandal (zither
like) strings and chikari (rhythmic drone) strings. The sursagar
was invented by his great uncle Maman Khan. There have only been
four sursagars ever made. Mohammed Ali Khan is a descendant of
and student of Bundu Khan, widely acknowledged to be the greatest
sarangi player in recording history. Mohammed Ali Khan has also
treated me like a son. He has taught no Indian sarangi players,
a tragedy as he is the sole possesor of the extraordinary techniques
of Maman Khan, Bundu Khan,
and his own grandfather Kale Khan. A pronounced bitterness with
regard to the situation of sarangi has prevented his disseminating
his knowledge except to singers, violinists, and esraj players.
He is a superb teacher, bubbling over with the desire to give,
and he is very fluent in sargam, the Indian syllables which signify
the notes SA, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha and Ni. He has taught me all
of the extraordinary fingerings of Bundu Khan's style and around
a hundred superb bandishes (songs). When I was in Delhi in the
summer of 1998, he surprised me by unveiling an old diary in which
he'd written 1001 paltas (exercises), some of which he had already
taught me. He is rumoured to know 5000 paltas. I cannot express
the depth of my gratitude for his kindness in walking out with
me in the noonday sun through the alleys of Old Delhi to a photocopy
shop and presenting me with a copy of this amazing collection.
These are not just exercises. They are beautiful exercises! They
are a profound manifestation of the system of mirkand (systematic
recombination of tonal material). They carve pathways in the brain
- all the possible ways to move from note to note. These paltas
constitute the bulk of my morning practice.
My work in India has resulted
in a unique archive of 450 hours of video of sarangi and hundreds
of hours of audio. Recently I have shown compilations from this
archive in presentations on 'Sarangi in the Home' and on 'Musical
Childhoods' at universities and conferences. My dissertation cannot
hope to do justice to the hundred or so sarangi players whom I
have worked with in India. The Sarangi Players archive in this site is a beginning of an attempt
to gain some recognition for these extraordinary human beings,
traditional musicians who have not always been successful in adapting
to cataclysmic changes in Indian society and the social context
of art music. After completing my thesis, I intend to do a broader,
more person-centred book on sarangi players. My thesis is taking
shape as a detailed analysis of sarangi style which will focus
on the teaching process and look in particular at the musical
styles of five players with whom I have worked intensively : Abdul
Latif Khan, Mohammed Ali Khan, Ghulam Sabir Qadri, Sultan Khan,
and Zakan Khan. These players have very diverse styles; together
they manifest most of the important aspects of contemporary sarangi
style.
My promiscuity with regard
to teachers has had its drawbacks, but it has resulted in a healthy
eclecticism in my own musical style. Because sarangi is so marginalized
in India, no Indian scholar or critic has demonstrated conversance
with the differences between the main distinct styles of sarangi
playing. Many do not even know that the sarangi's strings are
stopped with the back of the left hand fingers. I feel privileged
to have been able to do a thorough study of sarangi style, and
to be able to describe the specialities of the various existing
styles and demonstrate them via my own playing.
A short video extract from Raga Rageshri from a concert accompanied by Tapan Roy on tabla:
Selections from
Rag Vasant Mukhari
accompanied by Sanjay Jhalla on tabla
who
I went to for guitar lessons when I was sixteen. He taught me
many of his beautiful ragtime and blues numbers in the two-finger
picking style for which he was famous. We sat in a basement in
Queens an armchairs which swallowed you up. He had a number ten
tin can around the back of his chair which answered to all his
bodily needs. Mrs. Davis used to bring us lemonade. After a couple
of hours the Reverand would say it was time to feed Miss Gibson
- by aiming a five dollar bill for his guitar's sound hole.
myself with my electric guitar and producing a novel hybrid music
which was characterised by some listeners as "Indo-punk".
I tended to play all the instruments myself, not being able to
find knowledgable Indian musicians who were excited by rock, or
rock musicians who knew rag and tal, to which my new crazy music
strictly adhered. I recorded from time to time with pop musicians
such as George Harrison, Blancmange, and Voice of the Beehive
and performed and recorded with the Sons of Arqa.
harnessed
to my back. Many bells adorn my ankles , clanging while the two
of us dance and I play the sarangi. An amplifier hangs from my
neck, there's a snake named Shiva who comes out of a basket when
I reel in my fishing reel, and there's a transistorised car with
a soup can on top that goes around to collect the money. People
in Italy loved the car. I used to play a three minute song and
then send the car around for twenty minutes. My busking act brings
Indian art music to the people. People warm to Indian music and
have a laugh; I get fresh air, exercise, sometimes a suntan, meet
lots of people, and make lots of money. A stark contrast from
the proprieties of an Indian concert in the diaspora.
