Show #129: Debashish & Subashish Bhattacharya
Last week we took on some Polish prog and for this week's show we move further east to India with a recording I only recently received by Debashish Bhattacharya with his brother Subashish.
(Photo from debashishbhattacharya.com.)
Again, I am unfamiliar with the background of my featured artist so I turn to another source. This time 'round it's the BBC. In May took home a prize in the Radio 3 Awards for World Music 2007.
Debashish Bhattacharya learnt to sing in the Gwailor classical vocal style his parents were steeped in even before he could talk. Oddly, the instrument he was first drawn to as a three-year-old was a Hawaiian lap steel guitar left lying around the house. As he recalls, “it was love at first touch.”
As a boy, Debashish learned western guitar as well as sitar, but his most rigorous training was a ten-year stint during his twenties studying with Pandit Brij Bhushan Kabra, the great pioneer of Indian raga slide guitar. It was during this time that he realised his vocation would be ‘to serve as a bridge between raga’s past and future’.
Now 43, and officially a Pandit (master musician) since turning 40, he is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest slide guitarists, and has invented his own ‘Trinity of Guitars’. His Chaturangi has 22 strings, which enable it to suggest the timbres of violin, sitar, sarod and veena. The Ghandarvi is a 14-stinged guitar that can sound like a veena, sarangi, saz or flamenco guitar, and the tiny 4-stringed Anandi is basically a slide ukulele. He also has his own three-fingered style of playing which gives him an edge over others when it comes to speed and dexterity, and in 2003, he established a music school in his hometown of Kolkata.
The person who recorded this show remarks that it's "meditative music that deserves to listened to with concentration, not as background music". I will leave it to the listener to listen as he or she sees fit.
(Photo found here.)
I have no setlist but there are roughly three songs here. The set was recorded on 6 March 2004 at the Center for New Music and Audio Technology at the University of California, Berkeley. It features:
Debashish Bhattacharya - 24 string Chaturangui guitar, 14 string Ghamdavri guitar and Anandi slide ukulele
Subashish Bhattacharya - tabla
Download show
Debashish Bhattacharya
Virtually everything is on YouTube these days including this performance by Debashish & Subashish with Sutapa Bhattacharya. It was recorded last September on the 21st down south at The Chicago Cultural Center for the World Music Festival there.
(Photo from debashishbhattacharya.com.)
Again, I am unfamiliar with the background of my featured artist so I turn to another source. This time 'round it's the BBC. In May took home a prize in the Radio 3 Awards for World Music 2007.
Debashish Bhattacharya learnt to sing in the Gwailor classical vocal style his parents were steeped in even before he could talk. Oddly, the instrument he was first drawn to as a three-year-old was a Hawaiian lap steel guitar left lying around the house. As he recalls, “it was love at first touch.”
As a boy, Debashish learned western guitar as well as sitar, but his most rigorous training was a ten-year stint during his twenties studying with Pandit Brij Bhushan Kabra, the great pioneer of Indian raga slide guitar. It was during this time that he realised his vocation would be ‘to serve as a bridge between raga’s past and future’.
Now 43, and officially a Pandit (master musician) since turning 40, he is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest slide guitarists, and has invented his own ‘Trinity of Guitars’. His Chaturangi has 22 strings, which enable it to suggest the timbres of violin, sitar, sarod and veena. The Ghandarvi is a 14-stinged guitar that can sound like a veena, sarangi, saz or flamenco guitar, and the tiny 4-stringed Anandi is basically a slide ukulele. He also has his own three-fingered style of playing which gives him an edge over others when it comes to speed and dexterity, and in 2003, he established a music school in his hometown of Kolkata.
The person who recorded this show remarks that it's "meditative music that deserves to listened to with concentration, not as background music". I will leave it to the listener to listen as he or she sees fit.
(Photo found here.)
I have no setlist but there are roughly three songs here. The set was recorded on 6 March 2004 at the Center for New Music and Audio Technology at the University of California, Berkeley. It features:
Debashish Bhattacharya - 24 string Chaturangui guitar, 14 string Ghamdavri guitar and Anandi slide ukulele
Subashish Bhattacharya - tabla
Download show
Debashish Bhattacharya
Virtually everything is on YouTube these days including this performance by Debashish & Subashish with Sutapa Bhattacharya. It was recorded last September on the 21st down south at The Chicago Cultural Center for the World Music Festival there.
posted by Palmer at 10:32 AM
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