Page 158 - RPS Awards 2024 Coverage Book

actual concert itself featured one raag, Jhinjoti, with a short encore based
upon Charukeshi (also seen transliterated as ‘Charukesi’).

The performance of raag is a high art form. A raag may be ascribed different parts of
the day, and Jhinjoti is an evening raag that is described by Wikipedia as ‘light and
playful’; Bollywood lovers might like to know it was featured in the 1964 Telugu film Dr

Chakravarty (available for free on YouTube but sadly not subtitled).

The performance of Jhinjoti began, as is traditional, with an extended alap, an
introductory section that more often than not emerges naturally from the settling down
and tuning process. Degan almost teased the performance into existence, allowing

rhythm to gently infiltrate until it climaxed a markedly rhythmic passage,
with strummed chords forming the bedrock of the higher-pitched improvisation.

Throughout, one notes a very subtle, and varied, use of ‘vibrato’ and more extended
bending of pitch.

The sheer variety of colour was astonishing from one instrument; in the sitar-only
opening section, tabla player Harkiret Nahra looked entranced – and often delighted.

While one can map some of the musical processes heard in raag onto Western praxis

(registral imitation, for example, or descending step-wise scales enhanced by upper

neighbour-notes and, later, good old turns – Heinrich Schenker would have a
ball!), raag has its own highly individual world. Honed through many centuries and
offering a tradition of vivid improvisation still vibrantly alive today.

The tabla entered ever so gently. Singh Degun and Bahra are regular collaborators (as

you can see in this lockdown performance of the raag Charukeshi, whose
relevance will become clear shortly). The lower pitched of Bahra’s two drums seemed

almost to spaak its own language. Together from that point, Degun and Bahra provided
a varied route: there is a real analogy here with the idea borrowed from the art world of
Paul Klee’s ‘taking a line for a walk,’ perhaps (a line being a dot that is taken for a walk).

Here, it is the raag itself that gets fresh air, and while many performances are linear in
their increased striation towards a fast (and louder) climax, Degun and Bahra offered an

altogether more variegated experience. Most notable were the moments of near-silence
when the musical surface seemed to evaporate down to its barest essentials, and thence
to silence, only to be taken up again. This was daring improvisation, and all the more

exciting for it ...