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CD Feature/ Hasu Patel: "Gayaki Sitar"

  Tobias

The Dutch magazine “Oor” would, from time to time, feature Indian music. So, in between all of the new releases from the worlds of metal, pop and rock there would regularly be a raving review of a recent Sitar-album, reminding you how wonderful this music was. These intermittant phases of enthusiams lead one to ask a simple question: Is there something like a raga-moment in everyone’s life?

The story of Hasu Patel is like a reversed answer to this question: Her life is one continous raga-moment and she has invested all of her power in letting the world know about it. Of course, we could take hours documenting her hard struggle to the top of her profession, about the hardships of growing up in India as a woman with promising musical talent and with an insatiable hunger for knowledge and responsability. But Patel is not one to loose too many words. It is through her playing that she literally “speaks” to her audience – it is not for nothing that her style is referred to as “Gayaki Ang” (vocal style), a technique seeking to approximate the voice of a singer with the Sitar. You can truly hear the strings weep, wail, exult, whisper and break, as well as making promises (and keeping them!). What has helped her in her quest is the immediate and universal understanding for classical Indian music all around the world (one can access these works without any prior knowledge and leave the exact meaning and studies of form and function to later) as well as her boundless creativity and yet love for simplicity in her thematic material. “Gayaki Sitar” is therefore an album, which quickly tears down the initial wall of reservations and serves as an inspiring introduction to the art, tradition and practise of ragas. Far from the esoteric vagueness of new age prophets, they tell very earthly stories of love and loss, of foreign lands and of beauty in the smallest of details, conveying a feeling of comfort and very basic human emotions – there is no need whatsoever of taking in the lotus position. On the other hand, it is a work which will be of great interest to the initiated as well, thanks to its unusual restriction to “Alaps”, the opening movements of a raga, which could be characterised as “expressive meditative moods”, which unfold the structure and texture of the entire composition in a tri-part series of melodic and rhythmical improvisations.

So allow yourself to be drawn in by the mysterious “Raga Darbari-Kanada”, be overwhelmed by the pastoral tranquility of the “Raga Yaman Kalyan” or rocked into a nervous grey zone by the feverishly ondulating “Raga Bhairavi”. You will soon find that there is a Raga moment in every day of your life.

By Tobias Fischer