My best live experience: Pandit Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and Pandit Ram Kumar Sharma!!

Hi all,
Hope everyone is in good health and enjoying life to the fullest. I want to talk about a performance that I witnessed this evening. Quite simply the best live performance I have ever seen with my two eyes. The artistes in question were Pandit Vishwa Mohan Bhatt on Mohan Veena and Pandit Ram Kumar Sharma on Tabla.

The evening started well as we reached the venue (Tata Auditorium) on time, the event was running a bit late so we actually caught the soundcheck as well. Now since I have performed around the city a fair few times therefore I know pretty much all the sound guys in the city, and to my dismay, one of the absolute worst was handling the console and sure as the sun shines everyday he was making a lot of errors. Nevertheless, the quality of the performers was such that he couldn't make much of a negative impact.

Well after the soundcheck and the introductions, it was time for the music to take centrestage. Before he began, Pandit Bhatt gave a small discourse to the audience, speaking of the movement within a raga and the tradition of performance followed in Indian classsical music. For those who don't know about the order, it is the alaap followed by main theme of the raag on a fixed taal (gat) followed by the final phase of drut gat where the improvisation takes the most brilliant turns and the call and response themes are evoked between the lead and rhythm instruments.

The choice of Raga for the evening was Shyam Kalyan. The alaap at the start itself was absolutely mesmerizing. It was of course an added bonus for me that the Mohan Veena is very similar to a slide guitar so I could understand all that was being performed in terms of movement and nuances. The tuning of the Mohan Veena initially sounded like an open F major sus2, although I couldn't be sure of that.. He did change it later to a 1-5-8 tuning on the lead strings. He had a small machine with him which made the sound of the drone or tanpura, so that was actually neat, since he was able to control the volume of the drone himself.

When the alaap was over, Pandit Ram Kumar Mishra entered the fray, Tritala being the rhythm of choice. His entry was on small call and response session itself, but that soon gave way to the fixed structure of the raga. Now my elder brother was a tabla player and a good one too, so I kinda know the basic necessities of technique and slight intricacies of movement that are needed, so that being said, Pandit Ram Kumar Mishra is the most astounding table player I have ever seen. The clarity of his thekas, the quickness of his fingers, the position of his wrists, his control over the dynamics of the instrument, he could take the thing from a whimper to a rumble in a matter of seconds. There was a section where he was playing 64th notes (1/64) continuously for atleast 3 minutes till the audience had to applaud his effort. As is true for all artistes, the two Pandits were temperamental, which I appreciated greatly, and they really loved the respect they earned from the audience. After every cadenza, the audience let loose a flurry of applause and both of them lapped it up.

After the madhyam gat came the dhrut gat and that is when things really spiced up, the call and response section was amazing and I am not going to even try and put it in words because you got to see it to believe it. Now as a pure experiment I was actually trying to bob my head to some of the stuff being played and funnily enough some of my movements were very similar to the rhythm for a headbanging experience. Which basically meant that even though the music sounded very serene, there was a lot of aggressiveness in some of the improvisations, especially in the final sections.

They finally finished with a huge flourish. I realized that they had played one raga for almost an hour, an hour on one melodic idea (let's call it a scale for the purpose of understanding), with 3 notes as the chords in the background. That is insane, that level of depth is available only to those who are willing to dig deepest.

After that he played 3 more songs, one was a "pahadi" song, then a request from the audience, I couldn't quite hear what the request was but I thought I heard Dilli gharana or something in there. And finally he played the composition that won him his Grammy. I really can't say much about all the other songs for 2 reasons, a) I recollect them all to be awesome, especially the Grammy winning piece. B) The raga had knocked me out.

The audience was standing, the applause was unanimous, and so was the smile on all our faces, and on the faces of the two stalwarts who made it happen. Best show ever.