Music

The Royal Albert Hall organizes a program titled ignite in which budding artistes are provided a chance to display their wares during lunch time every Friday. I am now making it a routine to be in the South Kensington area during those times, check out the music going on the café and then head out to the museums. Last Friday it was a jazz performance by a group who call themselves Dom James and his Dixie Ticklers. It was a lively performance enjoyed by the audience whose average age must be over 70. Considering it is a working day afternoon I guess only those who have time (see previous post) on their hands have the privilege to enjoy this kind of stuff. I prefer to listen to live music in a café atmosphere rather than a stuffy concert hall. I am always too tense about clapping between movements! On the other end of the spectrum of reverence/irreverence we have these karnatic classic music performances during wedding receptions where the audience is busy jabbering away catching up on family gossip completely ignoring/insulting the artists. I would like it somewhere in between.

Does the Indian music scene have this wide spectrum I wonder? Classical, jazz, rock, pop, grunge, rap, hip-hop and so on. I know we have very established traditions for classical music and on the light side we have ghazals and quawalis. And then we have the film music. But is there any real light music production not related to films these days? I also wonder about the creativity of our musicians. Even in the classical tradition there seems to be limited composers and compositions, the artist can only render those differently in each performance but the essential composition remains the same. The number of western classical composers is numerous and includes both religious and secular themes. Is there any secular karnatic composition? Also the modern western musicians are very multi-faceted. If you take Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull (if you still consider him as modern and not Paleolithic), he composes music, writes the lyrics for the songs, plays instruments (flute among many) and also sings. And he is not alone, most of the serious musicians do that unless if they belong to a packaged boy-band or Britney Spears type group where the main artist is just a marketing front and a whole team is working behind this brand. How versatile are Indian artists?

Talking of Jethro Tull I was quite pleased to find his name in the science museum in the agriculture section. He had invented the seed drill which improved the productivity of wheat cropping by 8 times! The museum was just fantastic. I just spent whole two hours in the energy section and agriculture section. The energy section was all about steam engines and the various inventions related to them. Really ingenious! I will have to go back to the other sections later.

Talking of Ian Anderson, I found out that he had made more money out of Salmon farming, than through his music, in the Isle of Skye which we had visited a couple of weeks back! This goes to prove The Fundamental Interconnectedness of Things theory as proposed by Dirk Gently.

Talking of Dirk Gently, I know that a Douglas Fir was planted in memory of Douglas Adams. Do any of you know where? I would love to pay homage to that wonderful person.