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Surbahar - Pushparaj Koshti & Manik Munde . |
Raga Des
1 Alap 17.07
2 Jor 13.23
3 Jhalla 5.43
4 Jhalla (continued) 5.59
5 Composition in slow chautal 9.14
6 Compositiion in fast sultal 7.25
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The surbahar is to the sitar what a baritone is to a tenor. It looks similar and it
produces sound the same way, but it reaches down to deeper notes and shows a
different cocktail of overtones, the harmonics at higher pitches that you hear along
with the main tone giving each instrument or voice its unique quality according to their
relative strengths. Overtones are responsible for the distinctive ringing sound of sitar
and surbahar because they are deliberately amplified by the extra set of strings left to
vibrate freely when the player plucks the melody notes.
Quite often sitar performers have learnt surbahar as well, notably in the tradition personified by the late Vilayat Khan and especially by his younger brother Imrat Khan. Ravi Shankar too began his performing career on surbahar, and keeps an echo of its sound with the extra bass string that he has added to his sitar Despite the magnificence of its sound, however, the surbahar is too big for some pairs of hands. It is over 130 cm in length and has very long frets on its neck - and it is heard relatively rarely in present-day concerts. It was an invention of the early 19th century, probably by a Lucknow-based player, Ghulam Mohammed, though it was long attributed to Sahebdad Khan. It became
established as an alternative to the veena in accompanying the vocal form of dhrupad indeed a recording of Pushparaj Koshti playing with the Gundecha brothers is being released around the same time as the present solo album. And this album itself is distinguished by being an essay in instrumental dhrupad.
Pushparaj Koshti is a renowned player of both instruments, and thanks to the sources of his teaching has become a leading exponent of the dhrupad style. His first sitar teacher was his father, the late Ramlal Koshti (who was a disciple of the sarod player Hafiz Ali Khan, the illustrious father of Amjad Ali Khan), but later he studied with the veena maestro Zia Mohiuddin Dagar. The Dagars, along with their pupils the Gundechas, are at the forefront of contemporary dhrupad performance and Pushparaj Koshti has continued to learn under the guidance of the vocalist Zia Fariduddin Dagar. He is an A grade artist of All India Radio and has appeared throughout India and across Europe, including a stint as teacher at the Rotterdam Conservatory, the continent's leading institution in the field of world music education.
Manik Munde, who accompanies on pakhawaj the double-ended drum that is the customary percussion for dhrupad - is one of the instrument's leading masters. Born in Maharashtra, he studied with Bhakta Ganesh Anna Chaudhari, Pandit Mahant Amarnath Mishra, and Govind Deshmukh. He has accompanied all the major instrumental and vocal artists in the tradition of Dhrupad, both in India and on numerous European tours, and has appeared in a number of CD recordings. He first visited the United States with Zia Mohiuddin Dagar and Zia Fariduddin Dagar during the Festival of India in 1985,
and accompanied Uday Bhawalkar in a 1999 American tour; he completed his third tour of the US in 2000 with Shubha Sankaran.
The style of their performance is strikingly different from the tabla-accompanied concerts which make up the majority of present-day opportunities to hear the surbahar. They will generally be in the khayal tradition which evolved from dhrupad and at one point in the mid-20th century almost drove it into extinction. What you hear on this CD is close in form, and in quite a bit of its detail, to vocal dhrupad. There is an overriding sense of breadth and long-term direction, and in contrast to other instrumental performances less ornamentation and overt virtuoso display, especially in the earlier stages of a performance. A degree of patience is required of a listener, or at least a will to let the big picture build up over time. For followers of Western classical music the natural comparison would be with a symphony by Anton Bruckner, as opposed to a piano piece by Franz Liszt.
At the beginning the concentration on introducing one note of the raga at a time is even clearer in instrumental dhrupad than in vocal, because the note has to be plucked and then the sound dies away. It cannot as easily be slid into from a lower or higher pitch as a singer would do, nor can it crescendo. As you will hear in the alap of the present recording, notes are often attacked dead centre when a singer might soften the impact by moving towards the main pitch. Pushparaj Koshti's opening in raga Des sounds very decisive, partly for that reason but also because of the clarity of thought and timing that determines the gradual extension of the range of notes. Straight away the baritone register of the surbahar is the centre of action, and then the pitches move downwards into booming bass levels. A little decoration of the note, with a slide or an oscillation, sows the seeds of freer movement. Having started to rise again the pitch seems to be approaching its peak around 12 minutes in, though such is the slowness of the ascent, dwelling on each higher note in all its aspects, that the actual top note takes another four minutes to arrive and then, unusually and with a breathtaking sense of understatement, is sounded just once.
The basis of a pulse, of regular rhythmic movement, emerges just before track 2 in which the jor section continues its exploration still note by note but at about twice the pace. Hints of melodic shape begin to appear in the sequence of notes. Track 3, the jhalla section, is signalled by repeated notes with the rate of articulation doubling again, but at the same underlying tempo. This section continues in track 4 with a surge in pace and some clear emulation of vocal techniques ranging from repeated notes to quick stepwise movement of the melodic line. The whole unaccompanied part of the elaboration ends with a brief and gentle wind-down.
After this, just as a vocal dhrupad performance might continue with bandishes to set texts, accompanied by the pahkawaj, so Pushparaj Koshti plays and improvises on two compositions with percussion in rhythmic cycles typical of the sung genre. The first and longer, in a slow 12-beat cycle chautal unfolds in large, eloquent phrases to a fairly laconic accompaniment. With relatively few strokes to start, the players can still offer enormous variety of phrasing and attack. After about halfway there is a slight sense of acceleration as both instruments become more active and build up a great vitality which they maintain to the end. A fast pace proper is kept back for the second composition, in the 10-beat cycle sultal, when Pushparaj Koshti finally breaks out between returns of the melody into fluent, inventive and focused bouts of virtuosity.
Notes: © Robert Maycock
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