Taking new directions on an ancient tradition

SHIVANGI AMBANI-GANDHI speaks with some of the shinning stars of the Ustad's troupe



On our first meeting, a couple of years ago, Niladri Kumar pulled out his Sitar and bowed his head in prayer—after all, Indian classical musicians believe their music is an offering to, and a gift from the divinities.


Just when I expected to hear a classical raga a la Tansen that would part the heavens, Kumar begins head-banging on his 'zitar' - an electric sitar replete with a pick-up and a processor used by guitarists. "I don't play for Gods, but youngsters. And they like the sounds in rock music. So I give them their sounds and my music," he said at the time.


The sound is like nothing you can really describe in relativity to anything else—it is unique. And it is wonderfully hypnotic.


Niladri is quite what many a young musician want to be—he is a fifth-generation sitar player and son of Pandit Kartick Kumar, and yet has been able to grow out of the shadows of this legacy and be recognised as an artist in his own right.


Ustad Zakir Hussain is usually sparse and very tactic with his praise. On stage, while introducing his troupe during the Master's of Percussion is Sydney, he referred to one artist as the second generation of an instrument. Then, turning to Kumar, he said, the 'Sitar Genius'.


Kumar is seeped in his ancient tradition, yet not afraid to experiment. On our last encounter he had said that he feels like two separate people—one who plays the traditional Sitar, while the other head bangs with his band, Sitar Funk, which has played in UK clubs. However, today, Kumar manages to have seamlessly merged the two.


During Masters of Percussion he started off with the traditional melodic rendition, which moved slowly towards the more contemporary—at one point almost a shrieking Zitar.


This kind of experimentation takes courage. In the Indian classical music circles, fusion is almost a dirty word—a blasphemy of a sacred tradition. When I last spoke to him, he had said, that the rejection of fusion music today is probably akin to the reaction when dhrupad gave way to the khayal.


"Khayal singers must have been admonished for being populist, just as we are today. Every musician brings a different form and from that emerges a new gharana. What we look down upon as fusion today may become a revered gharana tomorrow."


So is fusion the new gharana, I asked him this time. "I would not compare fusion with khayal or thumri," Kumar said on this occasion. "Fusion is still not as defined. But, this is the age of collaborations, and fusion music is here to stay in that format. It is up to the musicians to create the language of fusion."


Many other young Indian musicians are creating their own vocabulary, which may indeed soon lead to that new language. Among them, is another of the Ustad's troupe, V. Selvaganesh.


Again, a son of the phenomenal ghatam player, TH Vikku Vinayakaram, Selvaganesh is a magical artist in his own right. His first instrument is the kanjira, but he is masterful with a range of percussion instruments.


He has taken his father's place in Shakti—with Zakirji and John McLaughlin—where he plays the mridangam, ghatam and kanjira. He also experiments with a range of African and Latin American percussion instruments.



"I have been touring with Zakirji since 1990 and he has introduced me to different music cultures and I have been playing different musicians," he says. "I have been to Ghana—there the people are poor, but rich in musical traditions," says Selvaganesh. In a true sign of the times, his range of music instruments, are made in Greece.



While his ghatam has been heard in background scores of films like Vanity Fair, Kama Sutra and Monsoon Wedding, he has just composed his first commercial film music for Vennilla Kabadi Kuzher—and he is proud to reveal that AR Rehman will release the music.


Yet like Kumar, and of course Zakirji, tradition remains intrinsic to his practice. He is part of a new project by his father Vikkuji, called Saptakshar (seven letters), which brings together seven musicians from his family, playing carnatic percussion in a contemporary format.


And there is promise of another musician from the family—Selvaganesh's 13-year-old son, Swaminathan, made his debut performance in Mumbai recently. "He has been learning with and accompanying Vikkuji for some time now—he used to keep the taal. And then Vikkuji told me, 'you must hear your son play'," says Selvaganesh.

"Swaminathan is late," he laughs. "I started when I was seven years old! The music is in the tradition."


Niladri Kumar's latest album, has been released, titled 'Priority' in India and 'Zitar' elsewhere. V. Selvaganesh has released a new album, titled Soukhar—an international collaboration with the many artists he has walked with in his journey so far.

Devissaro: an embodiment of experimentation

Tim Supple’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream left Australian shores a month ago, but for those who chanced to see it, the visual extravaganza still lingers in the mind’s eye, and the music still reverberates in our hearts. Even as I write, I can hear the percussionists easily capture the chaos of the fairies’ ritual dance at nightfall as they burst through the paper backdrop and climb irrepressibly along the bamboo wall. Or the perfect comic timing of the flute every time the hilarious Bottom cracks us up with another joke.

“The music for the Dream was often just small 30second fragments¾it had to capture the audience in that small time frame,” says music director Devissaro. And capture it did, creating a memorable musical atmosphere even when competing with Supple’s stunning visuals. “The percussion was often just a punctuation for the text,” says Devissaro. “The musicians had 200-300 cues and had to rehearse tirelessly to perfect their timing.” And cues in Supple’s play came in seven different languages - English, Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Marathi and Sinhalese. “The musicians do not understand all seven languages, so the cue must be recognised merely by the sound of words,” he explains.

Yet, the multilingual production had its advantages, Devissaro believes. “The blessing song in the beginning, in Shakespeare’s original English text is really quite corny and stupid,” he laughs. “But once translated into Bengali, it sounded perfect, especially with my Indian melodic sounds.”

Just as the text of Supple’s play was multilingual, so was it’s music. From Manipur came N Tiken Singh’s hand made string instruments, including the Sananta, a folk version of the Sarangi. Kaushik Dutta, among his regular guitar and other string instruments, also learned to play the Dotara, a tribal, folk instrument from Bengal. And there was D Prakash’s Carnatic mridangam, and percussion of other multiple folk instruments. Often during the play, my eyes would be drawn from the main action on stage to Prakash’s deft handling of all these instruments perfectly on cue.

The live music performance for the Dream was as much theatre as the actors’ performance on stage. “A good musical performance is theatre,” says Devissaro. “There is as much drama and pathos in a live musical performance as in a play.”

“Prakash had a larger-than-life stage presence¾after all he was a street performer,” says Devissaro. For the last eight years, Prakash had contributed to Government of India projects as an actor and composer for numerous street plays, creating awareness about AIDS, the environment and Education for All.

Prakash died in Sydney just after finishing the Australian tour. “It is really unfortunate. Prakash was especially wonderful as the drummer on stage in the scene of a play within a play. The musician replacing him, in fact will not come on centre stage,” says Devissaro regretfully.

The greatest challenge Devissaro believes, was working with actors who had to be singing, though they were not trained singers. “The songs went through several changes and had to be simplified for the actors. The accompanying music also evolved during rehearsal,” he says. “Tim is very sensitive to music and wanted a lot of music throughout the play. We were experimenting and creating as the scenes evolved. There was an openness to experimentation, much like playing games and discovering new things,” he says.

Devissaro is not new to experimentation¾in fact he really embodies the crux of experimentation, in every aspect of his life. Devissaro was born to a middle class family in Australia, a life he left to lead an alternative lifestyle in rural Western Australia. “At the time, like a lot of young people, I wanted to understand who I am without the distractions of things like the TV and refrigerator,” recollects Devissaro. “I wanted to simplify life. I lived without electricity or running water. I learned to grow my own food, milk cows, put out nets and catch fish, build a house and even raise a bee hive. I was living much like an Indian sadhu, without knowing that at the time, of course.”

There he built a meditation retreat, where city dwellers were given a small hut to meditate and their basic food requirements were fulfilled, all free of cost. Here he met a Buddhist monk¾ a bhikshu¾who used to conduct meditation classes at his retreat on weekends, while maintaining silence for the other five days. Influenced by him, Devissaro left for Thailand, to become a bhikshu himself. “A bhikshu is a beggar. He has no physical existence unless people do not have the faith and charity to feed him. Those four years, I lead an elemental lifestyle¾as a bhikshu you do not listen to music or even sing. It was like stepping into a time machine and going back 2,500 years.”

His spiritual quest then led him to studying Dhrupad vocal music with the famous Dagar brothers, Hindustani classical Bansuri (flute) and Pakhawaj (drums) in India, where he has lived since. There he met, and has been married to Daksha Sheth, often called the enfant terrible of Indian dance for her experimentation and innovation of Indian traditional dance forms. Outcast, including by her famous Kathak guru (teacher), Pt. Birju Maharaj, she has established the Daksha Sheth Dance company, of which Devissaro is the Co-Artistic Director, creating experimental dance productions such as Chaya, Yagna, Bhukham and Postcards from God.

“Both Daksha and I are lovers of tradition,” says Devissaro. “We do contemporary work in the knowledge that someone else is preserving them. With globalisation, traditions have become even more fragile. When Daksha took to learning Chau, it was not to innovate, but to preserve the tradition,” he adds

Devissaro has studied his arts in the guru-shishya parampara--the traditional, oral, Indian style of learning where the shishya (student) lives with, learns from and often serves the guru. “It is a wonderful way of preserving tradition. It is because of this parampara that India still has a wealth of traditional knowledge,” he says.

“However, the shishya, in this process becomes a close copy of the guru. They are so serious about their own gharana (music style), that they don’t appreciate any other. If one even shows the slightest appreciation for another style, one is thrown out.”

“Very often, musicians even refuse to teach outside the family, because they see it as a personal family heritage. Many of those who do teach, have secret material which they don‘t share with outsiders,” he says.

Devissaro was also trained in Australia as a classical pianist¾is there any trace of the Australian in him? “The real Australia is the vast country¾the vast open spaces of the dessert, where things are reduced to their elemental essence¾very primordial. Nature there is powerful and unforgiving, which I have only found elsewhere in the Himalayas. I like to believe that there is a little of that in me.”