the colour of rain

A piano and a voice. Together they weave a world of gushing passion, religious love, ethereal feminine beauty, intense devotion, a plea for deliverance, with a climatic understanding of the soul’s permanence and the body’s ephemerality. Anil Srinivasan and Sikkil Gurucharan collaborate yet again to produce complexity in the barebones combination of a grand piano and carnatic vocals. Maaya is the colour of the rain. Maaya is illusion. Maaya is a prism through which the colours of light get shaped in such a way that the old growth appears greener, and old colours find themselves formed into a rainbow, as the album cover states. The music becomes metaphor for the illusion of romance, or rain. The rain is gentle. It is the wellspring of all things new, refreshing and resurgent. The rain is fury. It prances with abandon, uprooting the old and challenging every form that comes its way. It is Shakthi, virile and potent, changing the course of several destinies as it unleashes its might.

The songs are sheer poetry. From Ponnin Oli of Kamba Ramayanam, where the grass underneath young Sita’s feet speak of her radiance and beauty, to a tryst between a young maiden and her divine lover, set in a garden inhabited  by nightingales, in Punguyil by Kalki Krishnamurthy, the bewitching words carry us to various emotional spaces, while the music remains free from over-dramatization of sounds. Here’s a transliteration (much of the complexity is lost in translation. from here) of Subramaniya Bharathi’s Suttum Vizhi Chudar sung to his permanent muse, Kannama.

Thy glowing eyes – Kannamma
Are they the sun and the moon?
Thy black eyeballs – Kannamma
Is that the dark hue of the sky?
Glittering diamonds-In
thy dark blue silk sari
Are shining stars – seen
in the middle of the night.

Garden flower’s brightness – Is that
thy alluring smile?
Waves of the blue ocean – Are
thy bosom’s thoughts.
Enchanting melody of the cuckoo- Is
thy sweet voice.
Innocent girl are you – Kannamma
I am in love with thee.

You talk of tradition – Kannamma
Who needs that?
For those in a hurry – Kannamma
Is tradition a hurdle?
If elders accept – our wedding
Shall happen later.
Can I wait till then – here
Let me kiss you on the cheek.

Maaya is the colour of the rain. Every song is clear and serene. Maaya is the colour of the rain. It reflects who we are. Maaya is an illusion. It is what we want it to be.

Pungiyil* from the album Maaya by Anil Srinivasan and Sikkil Gurucharan Buy from Charsur More Anil Srinivasan on his website. Annapoorne and Annamacharya Keerthana Kseerabdhi Kanyakaku Neerajanam with Subiksha Rangarajan are recommended.

~posted by nithya [* best enjoyed with filter coffee]

for the love of god

Emotions can be confusing — they are tied to context, but transgressive. They speak to each of us differently — warmth is betrayal to some, ownership is loss to some others. They appear, and re-appear, in the familiar, and in the foreign. How, then, should one handle multiple emotions stemming from a single experience? By doing nothing. Yes, that’s exactly what you do when you listen to the master of Qawwalis — Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Give in. Just. Listen.

How else can you respond to a voice that feels like rubbing your hands over yards of silk? Smooth, lilting, gentle, yet variational. It feels like a hot air balloon just released. Anti-gravitate and fearless. It feels like divinity has just presented itself to you in an inconceivable way.

Dub Qawwali is a posthumous album of NFAK’s lesser known songs, remixed by French electronica artiste, Gaudi. What’s remarkable is how Reggae meets Sufi, and does not impose its potency over spiritual expression. Instead, we hear an elegant combination, where the Reggae and Dub actually highlight the individual components of Qawwali. This is not your regular remix fare. Dub Qawwali – dreadlocks behind the veil.

Enter Michael Brook. If Dub Qawwali feels like a blend of music cultures,  Night Song feels monolithic. The opening track, My Heart, My Life is pure epiphany. How it gains momentum! Night Song is for the lovers of dusk and melancholy.

Bethe bethe kaise kaise from the album Dub Qawwali by Gaudi and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Ena akhiyon noo from the album Dub Qawwali by Gaudi and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Buy from Amazon More Dub Qawwali at Last.fm My heart, my life from the album Night Song by Michael Brook and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Buy from Amazon More Night Song at Last.fm

~ posted by nithya

–

black

Dawn is the sacred hour.
Dawn is the sacred hour,
Saffron and rose-coloured it throws open the doors of the sky.

Mists, like evil spirits, shrink and shrivel,
Vanish into thin air.
The sun pierces them through and through.

It lights the recesses of cavelike shrines,
Flashes on the brass and copper vessels of bathers in the river.
Pure grace.

Once the breath goes out, it’s fit to burn.

Your head,
Your turban, artfully arranged, will adorn it,
With the beaks of crows.

Your bones will burn like tinder,
Your hair will burn like hay.

While Vishnu reclines on a serpent called Endless,
Don’t fear death; welcome it.
Once the breath goes out,
Once the breath goes out, it’s fit to burn.

Dawn is the sacred hour.

World,
Secular or social interests as distinguished from the religious or spiritual.

Here’s the cause of it all –
It’s a house of tricks.

Life has slipped away.
No-one is left on the road,
And in each direction, the evening dark has come

Here’s the cause of it all –
(It’s a house of tricks)
It’s a house of tricks.
Ignore the world.
Ignore the world.
Ignore the world.

Kala from the album City of Light Buy from Amazon More Bill Laswell at Last.fm

~posted by nithya

paban das baul & the pure sound of surrender

San Ramon, a backwater city in the Bay area on a lazy June afternoon. In a solidly middle-class hotel, a thoroughly diasporic long-haired Indian and his old Bengali friend are catching up over music. Now, the long-haired one leans over to his laptop and says, listen to this. We are introduced to a rather predictable electronic atmospheric groove, textured by a vaguely Indian string instrument. Utterly mundane. Suddenly the friend sits up with a start, because a singer has broken into chaste Bengali verse: “As you wake in the morning, utter her name: Kali, Kali”.

I speak here of the second of Paban Das Baul’s collaborations with electronic musicians. In Tana Tani, Paban Das works with Calcutta-based Sam Zamam, better known in British Asian breakbeat circles as “State of Bengal” (listen to him in “Flight IC 408″ from Talvin Singh’s iconic Asian Underground album, Anokha). Asian underground musicians are known for their enthusiasm for taking perfectly good folk/classical music from various parts of Asia, and augmenting it with booming bass lines and fractal breakbeats, sometimes producing the musical equivalent of 50 rowdy conversations at once. Bauls are known for being drunk and opiate.

To understand precisely how strange this marriage is, it is useful to take a closer look at the Bauls, a community of ascetic minstrels from Bengal. From the liner notes of the album:

The Bauls are Bengal’s mystical wandering minstrels, keepers of a carnivalesque rave culture that is more than five centuries old. An anarchic sect of nomads, outcastes and ascetics, they have preserved a series of esoteric spiritual teachings which have been passed down for generations. They are regarded by many as being mentally unhinged by their asceticism – in Bengali the word Baul means ‘mad’ or ‘possessed’; in the villages of West Bengal they are described as ‘holy fools’; in Calcutta they are described as ‘God’s troubadours’. They refer to each other as ‘khepa’, meaning ‘furious’. Carrying hand drums and simple stringed instruments, they travel Bengal ‘s farms and villages, temples and shrines, bus-stops and wells, performing songs of love, desire and mysticism, carrying nothing but a patchwork quilt. They literally sing for their supper most nights.

To properly experience the Baul world, one has to enter a liminal zone: the Durga Puja celebrations, held in late September/early October in East India, and wherever there is a sufficient congregation of Bengalis. Durga Puja is a 4 day long affair, with pandals (tent-shrines) sprouting up all over, and a frenzy of idol-making and feasting. In the evenings, the Bauls take the stage, to sing songs of praise to the Goddess. “Stage” is somewhat of a euphemism here – Baul performances are very intimate, with very little separation between the performers and the audience. As with all communal music, this one starts slow and easy, but by and by the hypnotic drumming and the heat of the evening have completely enveloped everyone. You have surrendered to the intoxication of the Bauls.

And so Tana Tani. Music like this cuts deep. It brings back, with deft suddenness, utterly ordinary childhood experiences in a completely alien form. An underground sound.

Baul music is shorn of everything non-essential. At heart it is situated in two things only: people, of whom certain simple things are sufficient to know, and everything else, which is unknown. There is plenty of empty space in Baul music.

State of Bengal respects this: Tana Tani is a subtly crafted album. The beats retreat before the tinny chimes of Indian cymbals and Paban Das Baul’s gently winding ektara, the bass-lines echo and introduce his voice, and synthesised instruments reinforce the melody where necessary. This is well-dressed Baul work, and it is clear that the modernisation suits its rustic soul just fine. I am hard pressed to find similar examples of such sublimation, excepting perhaps the meeting of two blues cultures in Talking Timbuktu.

But enough of the prattle and let us have some of that pure sound of surrender

Moner Manush, from the album Tana Tani
by
Paban Das Baul/State of Bengal

Buy from Amazon or iTunes

~ posted by arvind