Jayanthi Kumaresh slides and bends around Simhendramadhyamam, a regally mournful Carnatic raga, using the full range of her saraswati veena’s fretboard.

Learn more about the music:
Jayanthi Kumaresh’s saraswati veena is an ancient instrument, named after the Hindu goddess of arts and learning. But her gently electrified version produces a strikingly guitaristic tone, igniting Carnatic classical melodies with sweeping bends. She started playing aged three, and learned under her mother Lalgudi Rajalakshmi, before leaving home aged 13 to study with her aunt Padmavathy Ananthagopalan. She also received instruction from her great-uncle, violinist Lalgudi Jayaraman, and noted veenai S Balachander.

A few years later she became one of the youngest artists to receive an All India Radio ‘A’ grading, earned a doctorate in veena history, and founded the Indian National Orchestra, uniting musicians from India’s classical traditions in a large ensemble. On recent recordings she has experimented with recording seven layers of veena on top of each other, and continues to write for dance and film.

Simhendramadhyamam is a distinctive Carnatic ragam. Its form of SR₂G₂M₂PD₁N₃S is akin to the Western Hungarian Minor scale, and a scale commonly used by gypsy and flamenco musicians in Spain. This intriguing shape is full of symmetry and near-perfectly balanced, meaning that if its pitches across the octave are represented as points in a circle, then their average position (or ‘centre of mass’) is the very centre of the circle. It brings a devotional mood, perhaps mournful and often passionate, capable of powerful cross-cultural communication.

Recorded for Darbar Festival 2016 at London’s Southbank Centre
-Jayanthi Kumaresh (saraswati veena)
-Aruna Sairam (vocal)
-Jyotsna Srikanth (violin)
-Nevyelli Venkatesh (mridangam)
-Ghatam Karthick (ghatam)
-Kiruthika Nadarajah (tanpura)
-Mithila Sarma (tanpura)

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