Jugalbandi

http://www.artsopolis.com/event/detail/63715
Shashank Subramaniam and Shahid Parvez Jhan Concert

I attended the above concert on April 9 at Milpitas. It was a jugalbandi of flute and sitar played by Shashank Subramaniam and Shahid Parvez khan respectively. Sitar is so sweet, it just always brings happiness whenever you listen to it. Sitar can never bring sadness, even in its worst it brings viraha - a sense of longing which is again joyous as per me. I somehow had not been able to get much respect for flute as an instrument so far. Pt. HPC did manage to give me the meditative nature of flute and how difficult it is to play it but its been a long time. Due to this , i did not enjoy Shashank's performance as much as i liked Ust. Parvez jis. But overall i liked the concert a lot. In particluar the 50 min Alaap was very very good.

Also, i do not like the way Jugalbandis are done (again my opinion). After some time, they all devolve to how fast one can play a note or a combination of notes which to me destroys the purpose. Music to me is there to be enjoyed to savored and speed is the last thing that matters to me. After the first raag, the following ones quickly devolved to speediness of instrument playing. It was not too bad, just that i would have liked to have one more full composition instead.

There was a tabla accompanying sitar and mrindangam accompanying flute. Sometime they interchanged and mridangam was accompanying sitar and tabla to flute. It was good to hear the contrasting sounds of both percussion instruments. I think i realized that i like tabla sounds better than mridangam, but as with my other views, it may change going fwd :)