A truly authentic rendition of Dhrupad on the rarely heard Surbahar by a master exponent of the instrument with fine accompaniment on the Pakhawaj 'the king of Indian drums'
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Artist: Pushparaj Koshti - Surbahar Manik Munde - Pakhawaj
Raga Des
Alap 00:00:00
Jor 00:17:07
Jhalla 00:30:00
Jhalla (continued) 00:36:00
Composition in slow chautal 00:42:00
Compositiion in fast sultal 01:00:00
Recorded Live at Saptak Festival - Ahmedabad, Gujarat (India)
Executive Producer - Alpesh Patel
Produced, Mixed and Mastered in the U.K by - Derek Roberts
Assistant Engineer - Krishna Shirgaonkar
Photography - Deko, Raju Srivastav
VFX Producer - Vijay Dave | Varun Creations
Thanks to - The stage crew at Virtual Studios,
Nandan Mehta, Prafull Shah, everyone at Saptak, Kanti Dattani, Rushi Shastri and
Verity Sharp (BBC Radio 3 / Late Junction) for inspired radio.
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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.
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. 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. 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.
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.
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. 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.
Notes: © Robert Maycock