Not quite Tansen

Tansen - from a movie reviewed by Sharmi Ghosh 

In India my parents invited Kamal David to play for us in our living room. When it was dark we seated ourselves on the raffia chairs and on the cushions of the low slung couch and waited. Kamal David laid out a quilted cloth on the floor and ceremoniously, he and his tabla player seated themselves. The lights were turned off and candles were lit. They both tuned their instruments and then began to play.

After the concert my parents asked if I would like to learn to play the sitar and my if my brothers wanted to learn the tabla. In fact my brothers had never stopped drumming. In Kenya and Tanzania they and their friends, Kikuyus and Luos, were drumming constantly on every available surface. We agreed.

Kamal David sent me a teacher in his place, Prem. We bought my beautiful Sitar in a shop in Old Delhi. It had an ivory inlay along the bridge and ivory wings were set into the large gourd at the base.

Prem began his classes by explaining the essentials to me pompously, while across the corridor, in their room with the air conditioning always on, my young twin brothers started tabla lessons. Their teacher playing an Indian accordian for accompaniment. Prem lectured. "Indian music is a form of Yoga. Yoga means union with the divine and it is a discipline and requires much work. Playing the sitar is a devotional act."

The correct pose for playing the sitar is so awkward that I injured a knee tendon. Every few years since then my it slips and snag and I can't straighten my leg until the it finally loosens and uncatches.

Prem familiarised me with the instrument: How to wear the plectrum. It hurts to wear this plectrum and it never stopped being painful, though he said it would. The two strings at the bottom are for melody. The strings at the top are for rhythm. The the myriad strings below are for resonance to be struck with a little finger to produce a cascading effect. I was taught how to tune the instrument until the beating sounds disappeared.In Indian music each note gradually changes into the next one as you stretch the steel wire. It is important to attune your ear to the fine degrees of change in the tone.

Prem told me about Tansen and about how ragas are played according to the time of the year and the time of the day and the prevailing mood. Ragas are written in 16 beat time.Tansen, in the ghost city of Fatepursikri, was such a great musician that he could make it rain. Once, Tansen played a fire raga and caused his sitar to burst into flames. Prem said this burned sitar of Tansen's could be seen in a museum.

First you play the melody slowly and meditate upon it deeply together with a few variants. You walk from note to note. Sometimes you stretch the string to move up the scale through a note..

Your first improvisations are chess moves and variations are handed down through time. Only when you have an honest understanding of the melody, can you start to improvise.Prem quoted Ravi Shankar. He said "To be a great musician you need to understand one single note properly, just one note."

When the raga moves to Jala, the pace and the level of improvisation pick up. But you always come back to the main melody. The rhythm and excitement come from the quick beat of your finger as it flies and flicks at the loose and brassy back strings.

A couple of afternoons a week Prem would visit and after nearly two years and after I acquitred something of a feel feel for the fine grain of life in India, Prem started to take a little pride in my progress. He thought I was ready and decided to invite Kamal David to come round and see what progress I had made.

Kamal David arrived on a hot and unpropitious day. He asked me to play. But I refused.

"I don't feel like it," I said.

"You play."

He, in turn, refused. "I don't feel like it, either," he said, and got up and left with Prem. Prem was humiliated and that was the end of my lessons.

* * * * *

When we got to England I kept my sitar in my room in Brighton, but couldn't play it. It felt ridiculous and inappropriate. During my first winter in England the sitar curled up and died. It's steel strings pulled and bent it out of shape, making it became impossible to play. A year or so after we left India I was told that Prem had been killed in a scooter taxi accident.

* * * * *

Ten years later I spotted an advertisement for guitar lessons, The teacher's house was in Camden and it was part of my drive down to college. His name was Davey Graham. He was rather like Prem. He was thin and had a ginger moustache. Davey didn't often make eye contact. He was white, but he looked a little albino.

After welcoming me in he disappeared into his kitchen to make some coffee, coming back with two mugs and quarter of a lemon. "Would you like lemon in your coffee? This is how they drink it in Morocco." I refused. "What would you like to learn?" he asked. "I want to learn to play jazz guitar." I said.

"Well that's a little bit difficult." he said. "How about if we start you off on some classical music to help polish up your technique.

Davey asked me if I had heard of his music and I hadn't. He pulled out a faded green album and I looked through the songs printed on the back. He played it and a stream of guitar notes flowed from the turntable. I assumed he was a hippy folkster from the late sixties and seventies? .

But he seemed a little overweaning. Davey told me that I should hit the strings not with a plucking movement of the fingers, but by flicking down on them. What strange advice. Who was Davey Graham to invent a new way to hit a guitar string? I had no idea. Neither did I know that he had also invented a new way to tune the guitar; DADGAD. Play something, I asked him and he played a flurry of notes.

So I learned a little bit of Bach and after a couple of months Davey asked:

"Would you like to come for a drink?" Off we went to his working men's club, not far away.

"Who's this?" said a regular.

"My student," said Davey.

"Let him play something then, said Davey's acquaintance."

"Would you mind playing?" Davey asked me.

I remembered Prem. I remembered Kamal David. I remembered how I had humiliated my old teacher when I refused to play and so I said.

"Not at all."

And I played the Bach piece and I could see that Davey was pleased. He was smiling at me. The man who had challenged us was silent for a while, and then, in a pedantic tone he said.

"Yes. OK, but his fingering was a bit off."