In the six months I spent travelling around India, I seldom left the hotel room without my trusty Tascam digital recorder, which I used to record sounds I heard along the way. The collection of recordings I accumulated is a real mixed bag - street festivals, interviews with local people, recordings of music lessons I've received, street noise, nature sounds plus some real curios - like the pianist in the teak-panelled restaurant of the Ooty Savoy hotel, banging out Boyzone and Kylie songs on an out-of-tune upright.
In this posting, I want to write a little about some of the devotional music I recorded. India has a truly diverse culture, and during my travels I was able to hear some superb music at various temples, Gurdwaras, mosques and religious festivals (I'm sure the Parsis, Christians, Buddhists and Jains have some good tunes too, but I didn't record them). The recordings, which you can listen to in the player on the right, were recorded all over India, in Karnataka, Maharashtra, Delhi, Goa and Tamil Nadu.
Track one: Hampi wedding band
In the UK, people are understandably selective about who to invite to their weddings because it costs a bleeding fortune. Not so in India, where it's customary to invite extended family, friends, acquaintances and then, for good measure, complete strangers. I was struggling up the hill outside Hampi bazaar on a knackered old scooter when I heard frenetic, exuberant music. I pulled up, a polite distance from the building where it was taking place, to check out what was going on. Within moments, a bunch of people were imploring me to come in and join in the festivities. Under a pergola were a ramshackle bunch of musicians, seemingly drunk on music - a clarinet, trumpets, snares and larger hand-held drums. What they lacked in subtlety, they made up for in crazed, wild-eyed energy. I thoroughly approve of this Balkan-style approach to wedding music - loud, messy and full of brass. I've heard similar music at other weddings in India, but they've all sounded a bit polite next to this lot.Track two: Qawwali music at the Haji Ali Mosque
You can't reach the Haji Ali Mosque at high tide, because the 500 metre causeway linking it to Worli in south Mumbai becomes completely submerged. It's worth the wander down there just to see the mosque, surrounded by crashing waves and draped in multicolour flags, but if you're lucky you can also catch some Qawwali music. Qawwali, popularised in the mainstream by the great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, is Sufi devotional music - odes to Mohammed, songs of mourning, and passionate love songs. I don't know what the lyrics of this particular Qawwal mean - if anyone could let me know I'd be much obliged! The music contains extended improvisation on certain phrases, often passed back and forth between the main singer and his student. There's also tabla, harmonium and a chorus of backing singers who provide complex counter-rhythmic handclaps. So entranced was I by this ecstatic music that I looked for similar performances elsewhere. Apparently, there's excellent Qawwali in the Nizamuddin Dargah in Delhi. I went along, and I was encouraged to donate garlands of flowers and cloth to various tombs, and donate 500 rupees to the Dargah's charitable foundation before they let me know that the Qawwali is suspended during the Muharram festival. Maybe I should have asked for a refund...Track three: Revathy Krishna at the Madras Music Academy
The annual Margazhi festival in Chennai is a feast of music, lasting over a month and showcasing more than 1500 performances of Carnatic music. For me, one of the highlights was veena player Revathy Krishna's concert in the Madras Music Academy. I've written a feature article on the festival for the May edition of British music magazine fRoots, which includes an interview with Revathy. In this recording, you can hear Prapancham Ravindram on the double-skinned mridangam drum, V Suresh on the pot-shaped ghatam drum, Revathy Krishna on veena, plus the obligatory tanpura drone.Track four: A brass band playing at the Shigmo festival in Panaji
Goa's got one of the largest Christian communities in India, but, judging by their celebrations of Shigmo, the Hindus are not willing to be outdone. Shigmo is a part of the primarily north-Indian Holi festival, in which revellers fling coloured paint at one another. The procession in Panaji included many impossibly elaborate animatronic models enacting scenes from Hindu mythology, all flood-lit, with sound systems amplifying the narrators of the stories. Parts of the procession had groups of drummers, dancers and brass bands. This track sounds to me like a Goan tune. However, some of the brass bands weren't averse to throwing in the odd surprise: I'm pretty sure I heard a version of El Condor Pasa by Simon and Garfunkel somewhere along the way.Track five: Singers at Nizamuddin Gurdwara
Nizamuddin is a vibrant community in the south of the Indian capital, littered with tombs and relics of old Mughal Delhi (including a number of very impressive restaurants serving meat-heavy Mughal cuisine). It's a mostly Muslim area, but there's also a very beautiful Sikh Gurdwara. The friend of mine who took me to the Gurdwara wasn't overly impressed with the music: "This isn't the really good stuff", he said. He seemed determined to find a better Gurdwara, and persisted in asking turbaned cab drivers where the best Sikh music was to be found. Unfortunately, whenever we went to other Gurdwaras, they'd tell us it wasn't on, or to come back at another time. Personally, I enjoyed the music, and didn't dislike the sugary paste they gave us to eat.Thanks to my partner Nia Jane Williams for all the photographs on this posting.
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