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Sacred Drums of India

Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri is the director of percussion at the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, Calif., and Basil, Switzerland. Students from all over the world receive intensive training in Tabla, traditional Indian drumming.

By Yafonne

Tabla Rasa in association with Door Dog Music Productions, presents the first collaboration of three master percussionists from North and South India on Aug. 27 at St. John’s in Berkeley, Calif. A tri-cultural music event, Sacred Drums of India will feature master Indian musicians Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri, T.H. Supan Chandran and Ganesh Kumar, along with Uttam Chakraborty, Tim Witter and Jim Santi Owen of Tabla Rasa. Together, these drummers will play off each other in an intricate performance combining the lyrical rhythms of North Indian tabla with the syncopated drumming of South India.

This is the first time that North Indian, South Indian and American drumming music traditions are coming together in a Bay Area concert, notes Owen, who just returned from his fourth trip to India to document Indian folk drumming under the sponsorship of Chicago’s American Institute of Indian Studies.

Watching an Indian drumming concert is like watching Michael Jordan play, he adds. But more than a basketball playoff, the audience gets a sense of the sacred and devotional as well. “In this world of so much immediate gratification, you have to get in a different frame of mind,” he explains.

In India, music is a form of yoga, a spiritual path. In fact, Owen says, “Some people … say that everything in the universe is vibrating energy. If you tune yourself to music, it’s like tuning yourself to the universe and God.”

Witter and Owen are the driving force behind Tabla Rasa, an innovative Indian percussion ensemble formed in 1995 with close ties to the Bay Area dance community. Tabla Rasa means drumming mood (Indian) or clean slate (Latin). In recent years Tabla Rasa has performed throughout the Bay Area and India, working with top masters like Hamza El Din, John Santos and Omar Sosa. The group has also collaborated with Gamelan Sekar Jaya, Bay Area jazz artist George Brookes and Vijay Ayer in New York, not to mention writing an award-winning score for Alonzo King’s LINES Contemporary Ballet, “Sacred Text” in 1996.

The highly respected Indian music scene in the Bay Area owes their origins to MacArthur fellow Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and his College of Music, which has been training top musicians from the United States and India for over 30 years. From Owen’s perspective, “I see more of a fluency, more of an appreciation. As audiences get larger and larger, there’s more synthesizing of culture.”

Chaudhuri is pleased with the state of Indian music today. “I see growth not only in the Bay Area, but all over the world. And I am very happy to see that Indian music is not only stuck in India. It’s in the mainstream,” he says. “In world music, it’s becoming a dominant theme ... I want to share it with students so they will keep spreading it, and it will never die.”

Though India has a multitude of music traditions, according to Owens, there are two main styles, the North Indian Hindustani style and the South Indian Carnatic style, both using different percussion instruments. When Persians invaded India in the 12th and 13th century, the South was left untouched and held on to its style, basic grammar and technique. Meanwhile, in the North the Persians brought in ideas, creating a new dimension of music there, explains master tabla player Pandit Chaudhuri.

“In the past there was that tension: ‘We are not going to listen to North Indian music.’ But now things are changing, and we are playing together more and more, and I think that is good,” Chaudhuri says.

Top kanjira player Ganesh Kumar, 35, agrees. “There is a lot of relationship between these two styles of music in India. The music scale-wise, the artist wise, rhythm wise, I do not find much difference between these music.”

Chaudhuri, 54, has been disseminating his knowledge of tabla in the Bay Area for nearly 20 years as principal accompanist to Sarode Maestro Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, the most important Indian musician in the 20^th century. The director of percussion at the Ali Akbar College of Music, Chaudhuri is the top exponent of the Lucknow Gharana house tradition of tabla playing, which he learned from his guru Pandit Santosh Biswas.

“I think it is very unique to have both the South and North come together. I think it is the right time,” says Chaudhuri. “All sorts of music need each other to flourish together. I think this is the time to forget about whatever happened before, but think about music, and not stick to just one principle.”

Pandit T. H. Subash Chanddran, one of the senior most percussionists from South India, has traveled the world accompanying musicians L. Subramaniam, M.S. Subhalakshimi, Dr. Balamuralikrishan, among others. Chandran plays the ghatam, a Southern style Indian clay pot instrument, and is famous for his South Indian style of vocal percussion, called “konokkol recitation.” His father trained the top drummers of South India, as well as the major instrumentalists and educators of this tradition. Subash visited the Bay Area 20 years ago at California Institute of the Arts.

South Indian kanjira musician, Ganesh Kumar, represents a different younger generation from India. Kumar was recently awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to live and teach this one-handed drum instrument in New York. “I feel through music, I am doing the constructive way of national integration and world peace...But for me, in India and in United States, we are showing the national integrity between the musicians.”

“There are not too many people who take on two traditions as Tabla Rasa does,” points out Owen, “Each tradition takes a lifetime to master. Our mission is to respectfully represent these vast traditions of Indian percussion while remaining true to our American roots as artists.”