August 24, 2008

 Photography: Fahim Siddiqi / Whitestar
 

Unlike literature where you need translations for people unfamiliar with the language in which the original work was written, and where you often hear the complaint that the sensibility is lost in translation, music has no such limitation, which is why instrumental music in particular has a universal appeal.

Fusion is not just between musicians from different countries, but also between singers and instrumentalists of the same country. The one such case that crops up in this writer’s mind is the TV recording of a song where the eminent Sindhi folk singer Allan Faqeer and a pop singer of yesteryear Mohammed Ali Shyhaki, joined hands (rather their vocal chords) and dance movements to record a duet which has haunted us for two decades.

A couple of decades earlier Pandit Ravi Shankar, who is not merely a great sitar player, but also a complete musician, performed with the Beatles and about the same time a concert with Yehudi Menuhin in the US.

Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, an eminent sarod player, who runs a music school for Americans and desis alike in California, was averse to the idea of blending our classical music with any form of Western music. He thought there was nothing more than sheer gimmickry in such joint exercises.

I remember his telling me, when I interviewed him in 1994 at San Rafael “What they call fusion is in fact nothing but confusion.”

But only a week later when I was invited by the tabla wizard Zakir Hussain to watch and listen to him while he was performing with American percussionists at the nearby town of Santa Cruz, I thoroughly enjoyed the blending of the rich sound of the tabla with the rhythm produced by metallic drums.

It wasn’t confusion at all. I wonder if the Ustad still holds on to what can be termed as sheer prejudice. But he is not the only purist I have met. I have known many people in our own country suffering from this kind of musical narrow-mindedness. I say this without being disrespectful to the great sarod maestro.

The hour-and-a-half programme of fusion, entitled Dialogue through Music, jointly organised by Alliance Francaise and the Goethe-Institut, presented first in Lahore and then in Karachi the same week was a thrilling experience. The twain did meet when two musicians from western Europe and two from South Asia played in unison at Karachi’s Arts Council. Before I forget, let me comment that the acoustics in the new auditorium didn’t leave anything to be desired.

The evening started with Pandit Ulhas Bapit playing on the sweet-sounding instrument, the santoor, which is a trapezium-shaped Kashmiri musical instrument. It was originally meant to provide musical support to the vocalists presenting sufiana kalam of well known and not so well known Sufi poets. But full marks to Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma who used it for presenting classical music and as recently as in the 1970s recorded what I feel is the finest jugalbandi that I have ever heard with the great flautist, Pandit Hari Prasad Chaurasia.

Back to Bapit; he has played the instrument on a variety of occasions, right from solo recitals to film music orchestra, not to forget his occasional forays into fusion. He presented the alap of Raga Kirwani, and soon after the applause ended, the 28-year-old Pakistani tabla player Irfan Hyder who comes from a family of tabla-nawazes and who was honed by Saffia Beyg of the co-sponsor group Sampurna, showed that his young fingers and two palms were capable of reproducing the throbbing rhythm of the pair of drums.

Christof Lauer, the brilliant saxophonist from Germany, who played next, enthralled the listeners with a jazz composition.

The most exuberant performer of the evening, a percussionist and a vocalist Patrice Heral from France, who performs as a soloist and accompanist with equal fervour, won over the audience with the magical rhythm emanating from his metallic drums.

Later they played together. Sometimes they seemed like jugalbandi (a friendly competition between two or more musicians) players and sometime like a small group of musicians whose main objective is to jell as instrumentalists and to blend the music from both the East and the West.

To say that they succeeded in doing so is to state the obvious. They left the audience spellbound in both Pakistani cities and in Mumbai, where they played last Sunday. One hopes music enthusiasts in our country will get to attend more such concerts. — Asif Noorani