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Metro Plus
Music sans frontiers
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Carnatic music has a new band of international followers who are fascinated by the ragas and talas. And the Marghazhi season with its rich fare of concerts has brought them to Chennai. Their impressions of the music scene...
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UMAYALPURAM SIVARAMAN has been the Pied Piper for a couple of musicians from Europe this season... the two young lads have been faithfully wandering from one festival to the other listening intently to concerts, keeping tala, and enjoying themselves.
One of them, Fabrizio Cassol, an Italian who lives in Belgium, surprised experts at the Music Academy when he took up his saxophone and diligently explored a series of melakartha ragas.
The complicated links between melakartha melodies, which only a giant like Veena Balachander had explored in the past, is now drawing the attention of jazz musicians.... and according to Fabrizio, Sivaraman opened the doors to this treasure to him. Fabrizio played a series of structured ragas on the saxophone, set to specific talas and explained how the jazz musician can extend the scope of this structure and make exciting improvisations.
Jazz musicians are serious students of world music.... this is not a tabla beat here, and a sitar phrase there, which are put on tracks and blended into Pop music albums. And if Carnatic music has found jazz musicians who go deep into its structure and understand the nuances and then adapt it to their improvisations, it is indeed a happy trend.
As Fabrizio says, Hindustani music has for long been well projected in Europe and America...but now people are listening to the ragas and talas of the South and see the potential of a great tradition.
Aka Moon is a jazz trio, Fabrizio being one of them. They are based in Belgium and have explored the music and rhythms of the Aka Pygmies of Central Africa.
With a holistic view of what music can evoke in people everywhere they have assimilated the ``infinite beauty'' of Indian music as well as that of the drums of West Africa and produced music which can be described as a fusion of jazz, rock, contemporary, techno...
Meeting Sivaraman and learning the structure of tala systematically helped them focus their ideas.
``The complexity of the ragas opens up another perspective of harmony as we know it in the West", says Fabrizio. He went to a concert everyday, and enjoyed himself, listening to music of very ``high standards".
I would love to stay longer, but have to go.... but I will come back...says Fabrizio.
Aziz, the drummer from Algeria concurs. He is familiar with the two traditions of music in his own country, Arabic and African.
He has found several similarities in the rhythms of the African drums and the mridangam.
He hopes to absorb more during his stay and study with Sivaraman while he is here. He says he is thoroughly struck by the tala system and wants to go deeper into the study of the complexities.
Surely Carnatic music has found a new band of international followers, and melakartha melodies will probably be recognised by those who can, in serious jazz music.
As for our rhythms and talas... have they not always found common links in various countries!
LAKSHMI VISWANATHAN
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