The final day of the festival is always on a Sunday, with two sessions, and over the decade and half that I have religiously attended most sessions, I have always waived the morning session because howsoever great the artist and the performance - the magic of the night is gone. When the festival used to be an all-night bash till 7-8 years ago, when th
e government clamped down the 10.00pm deadlie, openly pooh poohed by the irrepressible Pt. Jasraj first, who reacted to the announcement by asking the compere : Sangeet toh sadhana hai, aur sadhana par kaisi paabandi?” This year also, cops had arrived and had to switch off the mike when he was singing way past deadline -sad- but then we music lovers are given a double whammy by such happenings.
One, there are more music haters than lovers in the tall buildings that surround the venue (of course I can sympathise with old and sick, but those who cannot be soothed by such lovely music, at one tenth the volume of the Ganesh Mandals blasting mindless hoompa-hoompah-thud of modern day rap and hip hop and other increasingly monotonous quasi-mindless forms of music, should perhaps leave us music lovers alone. Two, the organisers need badly, to look at the alternative sites to escape all the problems - such as, the music haters sending cops to snatch the mike or arrest some rookies, the inhuman pressure of crowd on some ageing music lovers, the chowpatty at the rear end where eating food continually makes the youngsters chat loudly, laugh and clap as if the concert was happening far away in Nigdi or Katraj, the people squatting on the walking paths or trails… and the nightmare of traffic outside. Why can’t SGMF be held outside the city in Balewadi sports stadium or the Sahara India stadium near Dehu Road? There are a dozen other less crowded sites where this superhuman rush of people treading on toes could stop, the stink of the rotting food could be done away with and perhaps the performers could breathe in peace.
The newspaper reports say what I missed was Pt Shiv Kumar Sharma -who is probably the greatest living exponent of Santoor, a folk instrument that he has converted to a powerful medium for serious Hindustani Classical performances. I have seen him perform from the humble days when the trio of Pt. SS, Pt Hari Prasad Chaurasiy and now-forgotten acoustic guitarist Pt. Brij Bhushan Kabra, who recorded the epoch-changing album “The Call Of The Valley” way back in 1970s, when the world was going through an intensely musical phase. The youtube has a magical performance of Raag Marubihag by this genius. Kabraji was a successful businessman from Ahmedabad, who was not interested in promoting himself nor participating in international events a la Pt. Ravi Shankar, and later on Ust. Amjad Ali Khan, great PROs themselves, leading flashy ‘celeb’ lives. I feel rather sad that Pt. Vishwa Mohan Bhat who did a great PRO job of promoting himself, and who aims at the gallery and gleefully scoops up the applause at every thirty second interval, and who claims to have invented the Mohan Veena ( the acoustic guitar was already there for Kabraji to use to amazing effects many years before the world knew who this suave VMB was), became so popular that the pioneer is just a faded name. Having seen Pt. S.K. Sharma in many cities under many different circumstances, his morning performance didn’t attract me enough to make a trip.
I also missed vocalists Kalpana Zokarkar and Vijay Koparkar -both I have seen and heard in earlier concerts, some years ago. But I truly missed a golden chance to see and listen to a 9-year old child prodigy, Viraj Joshi, who is the grandson of the great late Pt. Bhimsen Joshi. This is incredible, the fact that at such a tender age, a child could face 10000+ crowd of pretty difficult-to-please music connoisseurs, and get an applause for this abhang and bhajan effort with his father Srinivas Joshi. May be I can search for this child prodigy on the youtube (which has enriched our lives in so many ways, if you search for the right thing!)
I did attend the second session, in the evening, and it started nearly 20 minutes late. One quirk of ticketing at SGMF is that on Sunday the cheapest ‘Bharatiya Baithak’ ( I love these Marathi grandiloquent names for the most ordinary things in life e.g. A cup of chai is called ‘Amrut-tulya’ -the equivalent of nectar for the soul, wow. Also an apartment / flat which is such a suffocating name in English, becomes a saucy and sexy sadanika… a sadan is a mansion, while a sadanika is a diminutive mansion. Wow, how poetic.) that costs Rs.100 per session, costs double that on the last day. Even if you want to miss the morning session, you cannot attend the evening session without paying for the session you missed. Whatever the compunctions, the idea is difficult to swallow without a hot or even a tepid cup of Amrut-tulya!
The first to perform were a female duo -which was a rare sight to witness, there are umpteen male duos around, brothers, cousins and father-son duos, but female duos? I can’t recall except the South Indians, wherefrom recently two sisters Lavanya and Aishwarya, had come to Pune to perform Carnatic music on alto saxophones. Oh boy, they really play it hard. There are enough videos of these talented sisters at youtube -the observant will not fail to notice one of them has been piling on kilos, as if she believed that the Apocalypse is sure to occur for sure on 21.12.12, or God knows what else.
Both Apoorva Gokhale and Pallavi Joshi, maintained their synergy well and seemed to have a perfect respect and understanding of each other’s style of singing. However the younger one, I think her name is Pallavi, with her jet black eyes that glistened with a unique depth, thanks to the hi-tech cameras, seemed innocently aware of the watchful gazes of 20K+ eyes. I found sometimes her facial expressions a little alarmingly mismatched with the emotional content of the raag Multani, which portrays the viraha ras ( pangs of separation), in fact she made herself look almost dyslexic, which probably needs some events manager to train her how to behave. They could use lifesize mirrors for these youngsters who get so lost in singing the do not know what ‘abhinaya’ aspect of their performance is doing, when not under control. The performance was very good. Apoorva Gokhale seems to have been true to her profession, the riyaaz and the taiyari showed or rather gleamed.
The middle-age-approaching Shaunaq Abhisheki was next. The sun had gone down behind tall building and I had chosen a spot in the open, the last corner left uncovered by tatters. At least six different pairs of young kites were gliding and pretending to indulge in dog-fights, which was a wonderful opportunity for me during the ten minute break required for announcements and musicians changing over. How severely handicapped we humans are, I was wondering, as I saw the graceful dives and unpredictable recoveries and false threats that the kites were engaging in. Clear sky, only two tall trees in the background, and a dramatic infusion of white steaks of clouds too high up above to carry rain, with reflected rays of a dying sun - it seemed like an impressionistic painting by Cezanne or Degas come alive. Back to music, Shaunaq began with a roaring lion sort of first few sound-byes that would shake up those sunk into their reveries. I tend to compare him unfairly with his very famous father Pt. Jitendra Abhisheki who always disappointed me in every concert, and his guru-bandhu, Pt. Prabhakar Karekar who was a hot new discovery in 1980s beginning with the Purna Ratri samaroha by TOI in Ahmedabad. I am still in love with his voice, very clean approach to improvisation and his least glamorous presentations that do not distract.
Shaunaq probably needs to have lifesize mirrors around him because his distorted facial expressions at times could scare kids into hiding beneath beds or in closets. I would advise him to grow a mustache too it soften his villainous expressions. He sang raag Amrit-varshini, which is a Carnatic creation, and one that I have never come across so far. He sang well, his vilambit and drut seemed perfectly timed, with great sense of unity between accompanists and I can’t really help commenting on a fashionable youngster who was his co-performer, Mahesh Kale. When viewed from a side profile he manages to look exactly like a drowning fish gasping for breath. I had to watch the crowd, which always presents plenty to observe, rather than see a novice who should always be videographed from the front. This overall impression dilutes the effect of his singing. The other two short pieces failed to impress me. I took another of my several jaunts across the teeming crowds to buy some CDs from the stalls offering huge discounts, and get jostled in the unruly crowds queuing up for instant nirvana at the Dosa stall. Probably 50 more stalls are needed for the sake of avoiding the precarious almost-riotous situations at the fast food stalls. But then we are famous for our Kumbh-melas, what is a mere pittance of 10K+ folks, compared to millions?
Parmeshwar Hegde, who looked terribly familiar, though I can’t recall where I had seen perform earlier, probably at the same venue some 4-5 years ago, was next and he chose one of my special favourite raags, Shuddh Kalyan. It was very decently improvised upon, elaborated upon and finally offered upon a silver platter, in a polished manner. Hegde has a lovely voice and like many other upcoming vocalists such as Kumar Murdur or Venkatesh Kumar, also with Kannada origins, and melodious voices, he offers very plain performances - excessive gesturing and gesticulating is disapproved of in the South, I presume. His briefer pieces were pleasant too.
By the time the famous Sitarist Shahid Pervez came, the crowd had swelled to the superhuman scale. He was accompanied on the violin by Atul Upadhye. This sounded like an odd couple to me.
Perhaps the the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn was right when he declared, the secret to great cooking lies in familiarity. I have friends from Northern parts who rave about Makkiki roti and sarson da saag - and when I tasted that after years of folks going ga-ga over it, I told them I would prefer to go hungry than eat the alien tasteless stuff. Similarly, a very affluent family in Ahmedabad, who went on raving about Daal Baati, were perplexed to see me eat a few mouthfuls and reject the stuff, for the same reason. Lack of familiarity. The same reason prompted me to go home, because violin and sitar made strange bed-fellows, and performers were nowhere near the highest bars set earlier many decades ago by Ust. Vilayat Khan and Pt. V.G. Joag. The thought that Northern musicians have failed to bring a deep sense of oneness with violin, compared to angelic mastery by South Indians, prompted me to buy a CD by the legendary Lalgudi Jayraaman Iyer, and walk out.
I chosen to miss the greatest of them all, Smt Prabha Atre - because again, I have seen her and heard her too often to be able to withstand any more jostling or that new menace to music, the cellphone. There are hundreds of music lovers at SGMF who talk loudly, usually giving precise instructions to some lost souls, as to what to look for and where to take a turn. As if GPS and other aids to navigation or the sms messaging exists only on some other planets. These are young folks, mind you, who do not care a fig for the dirty looks they get from bewildered oldies around them. But then in public performances the bitter comes mixed with sweet. Larger the setting, larger the dollops of bitter and sweet both, naturally. On the whole, this was the most wonderful music festival, lasting a whole week. Unforgettable.
==============================
One, there are more music haters than lovers in the tall buildings that surround the venue (of course I can sympathise with old and sick, but those who cannot be soothed by such lovely music, at one tenth the volume of the Ganesh Mandals blasting mindless hoompa-hoompah-thud of modern day rap and hip hop and other increasingly monotonous quasi-mindless forms of music, should perhaps leave us music lovers alone. Two, the organisers need badly, to look at the alternative sites to escape all the problems - such as, the music haters sending cops to snatch the mike or arrest some rookies, the inhuman pressure of crowd on some ageing music lovers, the chowpatty at the rear end where eating food continually makes the youngsters chat loudly, laugh and clap as if the concert was happening far away in Nigdi or Katraj, the people squatting on the walking paths or trails… and the nightmare of traffic outside. Why can’t SGMF be held outside the city in Balewadi sports stadium or the Sahara India stadium near Dehu Road? There are a dozen other less crowded sites where this superhuman rush of people treading on toes could stop, the stink of the rotting food could be done away with and perhaps the performers could breathe in peace.
The newspaper reports say what I missed was Pt Shiv Kumar Sharma -who is probably the greatest living exponent of Santoor, a folk instrument that he has converted to a powerful medium for serious Hindustani Classical performances. I have seen him perform from the humble days when the trio of Pt. SS, Pt Hari Prasad Chaurasiy and now-forgotten acoustic guitarist Pt. Brij Bhushan Kabra, who recorded the epoch-changing album “The Call Of The Valley” way back in 1970s, when the world was going through an intensely musical phase. The youtube has a magical performance of Raag Marubihag by this genius. Kabraji was a successful businessman from Ahmedabad, who was not interested in promoting himself nor participating in international events a la Pt. Ravi Shankar, and later on Ust. Amjad Ali Khan, great PROs themselves, leading flashy ‘celeb’ lives. I feel rather sad that Pt. Vishwa Mohan Bhat who did a great PRO job of promoting himself, and who aims at the gallery and gleefully scoops up the applause at every thirty second interval, and who claims to have invented the Mohan Veena ( the acoustic guitar was already there for Kabraji to use to amazing effects many years before the world knew who this suave VMB was), became so popular that the pioneer is just a faded name. Having seen Pt. S.K. Sharma in many cities under many different circumstances, his morning performance didn’t attract me enough to make a trip.
I also missed vocalists Kalpana Zokarkar and Vijay Koparkar -both I have seen and heard in earlier concerts, some years ago. But I truly missed a golden chance to see and listen to a 9-year old child prodigy, Viraj Joshi, who is the grandson of the great late Pt. Bhimsen Joshi. This is incredible, the fact that at such a tender age, a child could face 10000+ crowd of pretty difficult-to-please music connoisseurs, and get an applause for this abhang and bhajan effort with his father Srinivas Joshi. May be I can search for this child prodigy on the youtube (which has enriched our lives in so many ways, if you search for the right thing!)
I did attend the second session, in the evening, and it started nearly 20 minutes late. One quirk of ticketing at SGMF is that on Sunday the cheapest ‘Bharatiya Baithak’ ( I love these Marathi grandiloquent names for the most ordinary things in life e.g. A cup of chai is called ‘Amrut-tulya’ -the equivalent of nectar for the soul, wow. Also an apartment / flat which is such a suffocating name in English, becomes a saucy and sexy sadanika… a sadan is a mansion, while a sadanika is a diminutive mansion. Wow, how poetic.) that costs Rs.100 per session, costs double that on the last day. Even if you want to miss the morning session, you cannot attend the evening session without paying for the session you missed. Whatever the compunctions, the idea is difficult to swallow without a hot or even a tepid cup of Amrut-tulya!
The first to perform were a female duo -which was a rare sight to witness, there are umpteen male duos around, brothers, cousins and father-son duos, but female duos? I can’t recall except the South Indians, wherefrom recently two sisters Lavanya and Aishwarya, had come to Pune to perform Carnatic music on alto saxophones. Oh boy, they really play it hard. There are enough videos of these talented sisters at youtube -the observant will not fail to notice one of them has been piling on kilos, as if she believed that the Apocalypse is sure to occur for sure on 21.12.12, or God knows what else.
Both Apoorva Gokhale and Pallavi Joshi, maintained their synergy well and seemed to have a perfect respect and understanding of each other’s style of singing. However the younger one, I think her name is Pallavi, with her jet black eyes that glistened with a unique depth, thanks to the hi-tech cameras, seemed innocently aware of the watchful gazes of 20K+ eyes. I found sometimes her facial expressions a little alarmingly mismatched with the emotional content of the raag Multani, which portrays the viraha ras ( pangs of separation), in fact she made herself look almost dyslexic, which probably needs some events manager to train her how to behave. They could use lifesize mirrors for these youngsters who get so lost in singing the do not know what ‘abhinaya’ aspect of their performance is doing, when not under control. The performance was very good. Apoorva Gokhale seems to have been true to her profession, the riyaaz and the taiyari showed or rather gleamed.
The middle-age-approaching Shaunaq Abhisheki was next. The sun had gone down behind tall building and I had chosen a spot in the open, the last corner left uncovered by tatters. At least six different pairs of young kites were gliding and pretending to indulge in dog-fights, which was a wonderful opportunity for me during the ten minute break required for announcements and musicians changing over. How severely handicapped we humans are, I was wondering, as I saw the graceful dives and unpredictable recoveries and false threats that the kites were engaging in. Clear sky, only two tall trees in the background, and a dramatic infusion of white steaks of clouds too high up above to carry rain, with reflected rays of a dying sun - it seemed like an impressionistic painting by Cezanne or Degas come alive. Back to music, Shaunaq began with a roaring lion sort of first few sound-byes that would shake up those sunk into their reveries. I tend to compare him unfairly with his very famous father Pt. Jitendra Abhisheki who always disappointed me in every concert, and his guru-bandhu, Pt. Prabhakar Karekar who was a hot new discovery in 1980s beginning with the Purna Ratri samaroha by TOI in Ahmedabad. I am still in love with his voice, very clean approach to improvisation and his least glamorous presentations that do not distract.
Shaunaq probably needs to have lifesize mirrors around him because his distorted facial expressions at times could scare kids into hiding beneath beds or in closets. I would advise him to grow a mustache too it soften his villainous expressions. He sang raag Amrit-varshini, which is a Carnatic creation, and one that I have never come across so far. He sang well, his vilambit and drut seemed perfectly timed, with great sense of unity between accompanists and I can’t really help commenting on a fashionable youngster who was his co-performer, Mahesh Kale. When viewed from a side profile he manages to look exactly like a drowning fish gasping for breath. I had to watch the crowd, which always presents plenty to observe, rather than see a novice who should always be videographed from the front. This overall impression dilutes the effect of his singing. The other two short pieces failed to impress me. I took another of my several jaunts across the teeming crowds to buy some CDs from the stalls offering huge discounts, and get jostled in the unruly crowds queuing up for instant nirvana at the Dosa stall. Probably 50 more stalls are needed for the sake of avoiding the precarious almost-riotous situations at the fast food stalls. But then we are famous for our Kumbh-melas, what is a mere pittance of 10K+ folks, compared to millions?
Parmeshwar Hegde, who looked terribly familiar, though I can’t recall where I had seen perform earlier, probably at the same venue some 4-5 years ago, was next and he chose one of my special favourite raags, Shuddh Kalyan. It was very decently improvised upon, elaborated upon and finally offered upon a silver platter, in a polished manner. Hegde has a lovely voice and like many other upcoming vocalists such as Kumar Murdur or Venkatesh Kumar, also with Kannada origins, and melodious voices, he offers very plain performances - excessive gesturing and gesticulating is disapproved of in the South, I presume. His briefer pieces were pleasant too.
By the time the famous Sitarist Shahid Pervez came, the crowd had swelled to the superhuman scale. He was accompanied on the violin by Atul Upadhye. This sounded like an odd couple to me.
Perhaps the the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn was right when he declared, the secret to great cooking lies in familiarity. I have friends from Northern parts who rave about Makkiki roti and sarson da saag - and when I tasted that after years of folks going ga-ga over it, I told them I would prefer to go hungry than eat the alien tasteless stuff. Similarly, a very affluent family in Ahmedabad, who went on raving about Daal Baati, were perplexed to see me eat a few mouthfuls and reject the stuff, for the same reason. Lack of familiarity. The same reason prompted me to go home, because violin and sitar made strange bed-fellows, and performers were nowhere near the highest bars set earlier many decades ago by Ust. Vilayat Khan and Pt. V.G. Joag. The thought that Northern musicians have failed to bring a deep sense of oneness with violin, compared to angelic mastery by South Indians, prompted me to buy a CD by the legendary Lalgudi Jayraaman Iyer, and walk out.
I chosen to miss the greatest of them all, Smt Prabha Atre - because again, I have seen her and heard her too often to be able to withstand any more jostling or that new menace to music, the cellphone. There are hundreds of music lovers at SGMF who talk loudly, usually giving precise instructions to some lost souls, as to what to look for and where to take a turn. As if GPS and other aids to navigation or the sms messaging exists only on some other planets. These are young folks, mind you, who do not care a fig for the dirty looks they get from bewildered oldies around them. But then in public performances the bitter comes mixed with sweet. Larger the setting, larger the dollops of bitter and sweet both, naturally. On the whole, this was the most wonderful music festival, lasting a whole week. Unforgettable.
==============================
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