![]() After that, we might play a bit more, until eventually it seemed like time for me to get back on the sweaty, packed bus, three or four or five hours after my arrival. And then his wife would serve lunch-the most delicious food I ate that year, tamarind rice and vadai and pakoras and all sorts of goodies. We’d have tea and eventually start playing for a while-as in my earlier lessons, the training was all by ear, with him reciting rhythmic patterns (using tabla bols, syllables representing the drums’ different sounds) and me attempting to follow along.Īfter a while we’d take a break and talk over more tea. I’d take the long, dusty bus ride across the chaotic city to his home. My tabla lessons with the kindhearted Mr. With some persistence I found a teacher, N.V. Murthy, a tabla and mridangam player who’d retired from years of studio work in the Tamil film industry. Everyone told me I should study mridangam, the Carnatic drum, but I really didn’t want to start over. Chennai is a center for Carnatic music, the south Indian classical tradition, but tabla is a north Indian Hindustani instrument. I wanted to continue my tabla studies and found it surprisingly difficult to locate a teacher. ![]() ![]() Along with my studies came sublime concert experiences hearing not only Swapan-ji and Khan sahib (as they were called by students) but Ravi Shankar, Lakshmi Shankar, and a pantheon of Indian musicians who performed in the Bay Area.Ī few years later, we spent a year living in Madras (now Chennai), in south India. I was (and am) at heart a guitarist and songwriter, but I loved exploring the intricacies of north Indian music-it blew apart my notions of rhythm, melody, and musical structure. ![]()
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