Another year, another December music season has passed. With high musical redundancy and half filled halls it has been a typical personal experience for me.

Sometimes I wish I was present in those glorious years(40 - late 80s ?) that offered 'variety' in carnatic music. Lets take vocal for example, you could experience "live" the classicism of Pattammal or the poignancy of Brinda, you could get intellectually bulldozed by MLV or sink in the melody and bhakthi of MS, on the other hand you could experience the grandness of Semmangudi, or the flamboyance of GNB, or the simplicity of MMI, or the sheer musical depth of MDR .. I could go on and on and on ...

I am not in anyways comparing today's musicians with the past. Just that I feel the contemporary music and styles of those years seemed to be orthogonal and as a result, offered refreshing choices within a packed music festival like the December season.

Anyways, last year has been exciting for me. I became part of an award winning band - Agam. Agam was among the winners of the band hunt competition "Oh La La La" conducted by none other than A R Rahman. Check this out for some seriously good music by agam the band !

Mishra Behag ..

A short aalaap of Mishra Behag. Well .. sort of

PS : Use good quality of headphones or speakers while hearing.

Thatha singing Mohanam

A very rare recording of my grand father Sri Sambasiva Iyer singing the Mohanam raagam. It is a home made recording done in the mid 90s. Grandpa would have been 80 years old then . His voice control and shruthi alignment is amazing for that age !

Keyboard and Carnatic Music

For a long time i have been fiddling with keyboards, not in the western classical sense, but i used to try 'carnatic music' on the keyboard. I used to get highly frustrated because i couldnt express a majority of my musical ideas on the keyboard. Indian classical music thrives on "continuity", and with a discrete set of keys in the keyboard it is quite impossible to achieve continuity . Yup i have used the "pitch bender", well it is not possible to go more than one or two pitches using the pitch bender (they say with the latest MIDI keyboards the pitch bender is configurable). Well to me, the pitch bender inherently is not designed to go beyond 2-3 pitches and you need exceptional skills to control it even if it offered a high pitch range. Seriously I cant imagine playing the multifarious gamakams of thodi raagam using that !!

So basically to me "Current 'purely' electronic instruments are not suitable for producing Indian Music at 'real time' " I emphasize real time 'cos i know a bunch of music editing softwares that can do anything with recorded music.

Okay, now time for a short aalapanai of "Karna Ranjani" on my old casio keyboard (i have used the pitch bender).. , i have also played a famous score by the god : Ilaiyaraaja , sorry if they are totally unconnected couldnt resist playing it :D !!!


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A date with Nalinakanthi

Presented here is raagam Nalinakanthi. A beautiful raaga, priceless gift from Saint Thyagaraja ! Wonder how he could ever think of such melody (legend says it that Sage Narada blessed him with the knowledge of such raagas)

I have tried my best to capture its essence .. I had to cut short the recording so that it takes less time to cache .. You can clearly notice the lack of practice and stamina in the voice. Wonder how the professionals maintain their voice consistently for 3-4 hours !
If you think "Will this guy ever sing songs ??" .. wait for my next post :)



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Keeravani in Hotel California

A humble attempt of "fusion" with the legendary "Hotel California" by Eagles. When i heard the acoustic version of this song, i couldnt help myself hum along the intial guitar piece, my friend recorded it, we then tweaked it a bit and thats it .. it all took some 30-40 mins of work :)

Its no wonder that i could easily fit in "Keeravani" within the song, as most of the Latino-American music revolves around Keeravani - Natabhairavi scales. To my mind this song in itself is an amazing blend of Latino-American music with Soft Rock. The Eagles are simpy great !!

This piece was done using a home computer and a decent voice mike (With some construction work go behind ). The exceptional quality of the mix is entirely due to the efforts of my friend Ganesh.

PS: To be heard with good set of speakers or headphone. Allow the song to run once even if it breaks and then re-play it.

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This piece is from a concert i gave last year ... Its raaga alaapanai of Simhendra Madhyamam. I also tried out little bit of "Griha Bedham" which is singing a raaga within another raaga by shifting the base "Sa" to another note. Here i had shifted "Sa" to "Pa" ..and omitted "Sa", it would be great if the listener listens to the piece and is able to make out the resultant raaga ... My presentation could have been much better though .. sung very fast .. !! The piece is very lengthy and the recording is very poor as it is taken from a cassette (Didnt have a MD recorder that time ..) .. but still listenable :D

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