S2 EP1 | Shashank Subramanyum & Purbayan Chatterjee
55m
Recorded at Darbar Festival 2009, on 5th April, at the Purcell Room of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, at London's Southbank Centre.
Musicians:
- Purbayan Chatterjee (sitar)
- Shashank Subramanyam (bansuri)
- Patri Satish Kumar (mridangam)
- Sukhvinder Singh (tabla)
- Gunwant Kaur (tanpura)
- Debipriya Das (tanpura)
Raag Nat Bhairav; Thaat: Bhairav; Samay: Morning
Ragam Sarasangi
Two maestros weave the sounds of the sitar and bansuri through Raag Nat Bhairav and its south Indian counterpart Ragam Sarasangi. Slowly narrating from the alaap to jor and gat, they build up an exciting musical conversation that is not just electric but also joyfully complementary. They are accompanied by Patri Satish Kumar (mridangam) and Sukhvinder Singh (tabla), who provide stunning arithmetic improvised accompaniment in adi tala (8 beats), jhaaptal (10 beats) and teental (16 beats).
Purbayan Chatterjee’s accomplished sitar playing is rooted in the Senia Maihar gharana’s blend of Dhrupad and khayal. His style was shaped by his father Pandit Parthapratim Chatterjee as well as taking great inspiration from the ideas of Pandit Nikhil Banerjee and Ustad Amir Khan.
Shashank Subramanyam was born to a biochemist father in the extraordinarily musical village of Rudrapatna, in Karnataka, and started learning early in life - some say he could recognise all 72 Melakarta scales by the age of two-and-a-half. His first musical immersions came with singing and violin, but he fell in love with the bansuri as soon as he picked it up, focusing on it from that point onwards.