Our First Month in India
Trip Start
Jan 01, 2009
1
6
20
Trip End
Jul 29, 2009
Kolkata (Calcutta), West Bengal, India
Monday, February 2, 2009
Since our last blog, we have spent most of our time practicing all the compositions we have been given and learning new Ragas. We had one adventure to Bali, a village about 2 1/2 hours outside of Kolkata, where we performed for a 75th anniversary celebration for a school. We have found that we learn so much from our experiences on stage, but as this trip showed us, there is also so much to learn from the journey surrounding the 'gig'. For this concert, 9 of us piled into a Jeep and packed our instruments on the roof! We then drove out of the city, which led us past the leather and hide making area as well as the garbage dump, a true test of getting over the smells you find in India. As our 2 hour drive took us further from the big city, everything seemed to get smaller and more basic. The villages became smaller, and then the houses which became mud and straw huts, the roads diminished from a nicely paved highway all the way to an extremely uneven dirt road, where only a few cars were to be found. When we reached the end of the road, it really was the end of the road as we unloaded and carried our equipment onto a river boat. The trip lasted no more than 3-5 min and we could clearly see across the river, but there was no bridge and obviously the river boat system was the only possibility for this area. When we reached the other side we were greeted by most or all of the people in the village who stopped, gathered and stared while we waited for a ride to where we were performing. It was interesting to try and speak with these villagers with the little Bengali that we new, and I think their experience seeing and meeting probably the only white people they have every seen was just as exciting. The group that gathered wasn't shy about following us when we decided to move and eventually leave for our final destination. We travelled to the school that was celebrating and then rested for an hour or 2 before taking the stage for our performance. We performed 4 peices that we had been working on and then accompanied Shantanu for a quick ending Raga Bhairavi as the organizers told us to wrap it up. It was a little unfortunate that we got pushed off stage, but as we learnt the people in the village don't really listen to much classical music and were most eager to hear the pop type bengali music. It was definitely an experience to play for such an audience and learn that there is always a proper audience for every type of music. We returned to Kolkata in the dark and had a well deserved sleep after an exciting day-long journey.
We are about to set out on a 4 day long Journey to Borampur to perform 2 more concerts and will travel in the same format. When we return I'm sure we'll have many more stories, pictures and videos to show you.
For now, I'm posting some pics and also a short clip from one of lessons the other day. Most of our lessons are like this but X10, in intesity and material, but this should give you an idea of what we're working on right now. It's a spring Raga, Basant which has the notes S G M d N S , S N d P M G r S, and for the non-Sargam educated (most of you) it is in the Key of D: D F# G# Bb C# D , D C# Bb A G# F# Eb D. It has quite an amazing quality and is so beautiful when played with the right movements. Hopefully you can get a sense of it in the short clip. We are hopeig to perform this Raga soon and will post a video when we do.
We hope all of you are still doing great and will hope to hear from you soon.
Namaste,
Andrew, Jonathan, & Justin
Comments
life as a gigging musician
Hi guys, great to hear your stories. It sounds like you are having an amazing time. The concerts must be a lot of fun, but we hope you have a chance to play some Monsoon charts at a few of them. Let us know if you've seen any Royal Enfield motorcycles with sidecar. We want one if we can get over there next year! Take care, we look forward to your next entry.
Al and Judy.