sarod - how many fingers
bhargav
feeling is that the playing should be aesthetically pleasing. Sarod by
design is such an instrument that playing any odd jump notes is just
not made for it. Well, one may use one, two, three, four or even five
fingers to play the instrument, as long as the sound or the raaga that
comes out is good to listen to and within reasonable limits, remains
well explored. I think, this has been well done even with the two
finger usage of Ustad Amjad Ali Khan.
A lot in our icm depands on moods of the performers, the tayyari at
that particular time etc. So if a Shree Raga is not well executed, it
may be for some other reasons. There have been performances where the
same raag and even Marwa were executed immaculately and with great
sense of aesthetics.
swarodia
Arnab's posting on History of Sarod and Raag Marwa...
No one has so far been able to bring out the the kind of crispness in
sarod playing that Ustad Amjadi Ali Khan does. No one will be able to
in the near future, until some one comes up with a gizmo that
electronically controls all the tuning pegs, the flashing leds if
besura etc....an e-sarod!
Ustad Ali Akbar's play has been good only in slow movements. That is
mainly because of the 15 tarafs and the 4 sobbing chikaras ( i call
them sobbing, as on each stroke, it sounds as though the instrument is
sobbing. The moment jod begins, you feel as though you are in some
circus and the jhalla is pure, cacophony. All this is the doing of the
3rd finger, i guess. And also the frequent use of finger tip flesh,
rather than the nail.
It may not be the third finger after all.. its simply the style
because if you hear Zarin daruwala (sharma), her playing is immaculate
and crisp, even though she uses UAA sarod and uses three fingers.
So I do agree with you about wheather you use one or five or 10
fingers to play the instrument, it is ultimately what you bring out
of the instrument in its aesthetics that matters. Moreover, the
instrument has to be treated with care and gentleness, rather than a
punchbag.
bhar...@hotmail.com (bhargav) wrote in message news:<9d28ce8a.01090...@posting.google.com>...
Arnab Chakrabarty
equals her as a recording artiste. :-). Zarinji's raagdari is also of a higher order thanks to the immaculate
taleem she has received from Acharya S N Ratanjankar and Dr S C R Bhatt.
Warm regards,
a
Ramu
no matter what you say UAAK sounds better anyday...
R!
swar...@onebox.com (swarodia) wrote in message news:<900047f6.01090...@posting.google.com>...
maitreaus
how many sarode players have you heard over the last few decades?
Right now there are quite a few sarodiyas in India who can surpass our
much hyped AmAK on any count.
Maitreyaus
There are umpteen examples of
swar...@onebox.com (swarodia) wrote in message news:<900047f6.01090...@posting.google.com>...
> I think you are refering here to the rather lop sided comments on
> Arnab's posting on History of Sarod and Raag Marwa...
>
> No one has so far been able to bring out the the kind of crispness in
> sarod playing that Ustad Amjadi Ali Khan does. No one will be able to
> in the near future, until some one comes up with a gizmo that
> electronically controls all the tuning pegs, the flashing leds if
> besura etc....an e-sarod!
How many sarodiyas have you heard my dear friend?
I have heard early recordings of AAK, the world of present day has no
idea of the kind of speed and clarity he had. If you have heard some
of the early 78 rpm recordings of Alauddin Khan, you would laugh at
your own comment! It is rather unfortunate that people , not having
listened to all of it,come up with such sweeping remarks. People who
have heard Buddhadev Dasgupta in his younger days would rate your
comment as totally lop-sided !
>
> Ustad Ali Akbar's play has been good only in slow movements. That is
> mainly because of the 15 tarafs and the 4 sobbing chikaras ( i call
> them sobbing, as on each stroke, it sounds as though the instrument is
> sobbing. The moment jod begins, you feel as though you are in some
> circus and the jhalla is pure, cacophony.
Ustad AmAK does the same quite often. The latter part of his jhala and
some of his gamaks are are sheer noise pollution!
ll this is the doing of the
> 3rd finger, i guess. And also the frequent use of finger tip flesh,
> rather than the nail.
> It may not be the third finger after all.. its simply the style
> because if you hear Zarin daruwala (sharma), her playing is immaculate
> and crisp, even though she uses UAA sarod and uses three fingers.
The (correct)use of third finger would make a 'hell of a lot' of
difference.If you have ever laid you hand on a sarode you will know
that
The distance between two full notes on a sarode plate is approximately
equivalent to the distance between the first and third finger. Use of
two fingers to negotiate the distance of a full note is intrinsically
unscientific!
Sajjad Khaliq
: No one has so far been able to bring out the the kind of crispness in
: sarod playing that Ustad Amjadi Ali Khan does.
A fair comment.
: Ustad Ali Akbar's play has been good only in slow movements. That is
: mainly because of the 15 tarafs and the 4 sobbing chikaras ( i call
: them sobbing, as on each stroke, it sounds as though the instrument is
: sobbing.
I always charaterise them as sulking.
Jody Stecher
> : No one has so far been able to bring out the the kind of crispness in
> : sarod playing that Ustad Amjadi Ali Khan does.
> A fair comment.
unless you happen to have heard Buddhadev Das Gupta's early recordings. They
are very crisp and the fast tans are clear as a bell. Amjad Ali Khan's a
great player at the times that he is (great), and at slow speed too.
Crispness however is not the first attribute that comes to mind. No sarcasm
whatever intended here. His sound is rather liquid I'd say. This is
subjective I know. I associate dryness and crispness. Hafiz Ali had a dry
sound. And Radhika Mohan Moitra. So did Allauddin Khan, and with a different
sort of instrument.
Clarity is partly a function of practice and technique and the intent and
ability of the player but as other posters to this thread have pointed out
there are also purely physical acoustic factors. The shorter the sustain of
the sarod string the crisper the tone. Proximity or distance to the bridge
at the point of contact of plectrum to string also has an effect. So does
the length and diameter of the string and the tension at which it is
stretched and the downward pressure on the bridge and how the strings sit in
the notches in the bridge and even the angle at which the strings leave the
bridge toward the taipiece. The use or non-use of the resonating bell and
its dimensions and shape and composition (wood? metal? gourd?) also has an
effect on the crispness/clarity as does the type of wood from which the
sarod has been made. Toon and Teek have strikingly different acoustic
properties. Each of the sarodiyas discussed on this thread has a prefered
setup that is somewhat different from the others. They are not playing the
same sarod.
Then there is the issue of how the player grips and utilizes the plectrum,
and in what way the right hand plays patterns. All these, and the angle at
which the plectrum contacts the string have an effect on tone, crisp and
otherwise.
Then there is the issue of intent. All players do not value crispness
equally.
> : Ustad Ali Akbar's play has been good only in slow movements.
Listen to his 78s and 45s and old AIR broadcasts from the 1940s and 50s.
The fast music is well conceived and very well played. I agree that he has
played a lot of high speed noise in the last quarter of the 20th century.
That, along with some excellent music.
Ali Akbar has stressed tonal variety and tonal depth and has sacrificed some
clarity for this attribute. And --also--- I've heard him play muddy.
> :That is mainly because of the 15 tarafs and the 4 sobbing chikaras
I don't think it's as simple as that. If that were the case how did he get
such clarity in his youth? (One suggestion I've heard is that he employed a
different plectrum grip than that which he has used in the last 30 years or
so.)
> :( i call them sobbing, as on each stroke, it sounds as though the instrument
is : sobbing.
Sobbing for some is a musical virtue. There is even an entire genre of
(Brazilian ) music ... Choro... the name means *weeping.*
But perhaps the comments about sobbing/sulking are not about musical
expression but about the by-products of a certain instrumental set-up, a
complexity of sound that does not appeal to some.
> The bare fact remains that Amjad at his best is nowhere within a
> one-hundred mile radius when you hear Ali Akbar at his best.
that is not a (bare) fact. I happen to know that Amjad at his best is 37.2
miles from Ali Akbar' s best and at his worst is still within a 65 mile
radius.
I measured it myself.
Let's be fair.
OK, seriously, by the time Amjad was making recordings he was playing
obviously cleaner than Ali Akbar was at the time. He has retained that clean
edge ever since. Cleanliness is not, however, universally regarded as the
highest virtue in music. There is a depth to Ali Akbar's music at it's
serious and sober best that to my ear has yet to be matched by other sarod
players. His 78s are hard to come by, but his 45 rpm records are readily
available on cassette (and maybe CD). There is some overwhelmingly beautiful
music there and it is played without a blemish.
Also some of Ali Akbar's most beautiful music IS accompanied by blemishes.
Some of his old LPs come to mind as well as radio broadcasts.
Why is it that many ICM listeners will tolerate any amount of coughing and
throat clearing and phlegm adjustment from vocalists but are hostile to the
non-vocal equivalent from instrumentalists? Just curious.
JS
Rajan P. Parrikar
.
.
>Also some of Ali Akbar's most beautiful music IS accompanied by blemishes.
>Some of his old LPs come to mind as well as radio broadcasts.
>
>Why is it that many ICM listeners will tolerate any amount of coughing and
>throat clearing and phlegm adjustment from vocalists but are hostile to the
>non-vocal equivalent from instrumentalists? Just curious.
It is not clear what you mean by "blemishes." If by that you mean going
besurA then it is not looked upon too kindly either in vocalists or
instrumentalists. But the context is important. Is it just the
odd slip-up in an otherwise solid performance of is it chronic? If
the former it hardly matters in most instances unless the false step
is so egregious that it generates an unshakeable unpleasant feeling.
Mallikarjun Mansur, in his final years, used to call his singing
"retirement kA gAnA" in acknowledgement of his fading prowess wrought
by old age. He was, of course, being extremely modest for even with the
occasional slips he was as glorious as can be. Age is particularly
unkind to instrumentalists with loss of motor skills particularly acute.
They are, therefore, well-advised to focus on those aspects of
performance where they have something useful to say and leave the
virtuosic elements to the younger fellas. But some of our Emperors
won't have any of that. Their delusions are such that not only
will they not acknowledge their slips they will decree that noone else
ought to. In such times it is apposite to remind the Empies why
God gave us the middle finger.
Warm regards,
r
Brian Minsk
<B7C2CB96.1BFBC%jste...@mindspring.com>:
>
>OK, seriously, by the time Amjad was making recordings he was playing
>obviously cleaner than Ali Akbar was at the time. He has retained that
>clean edge ever since. Cleanliness is not, however, universally
>regarded as the highest virtue in music. There is a depth to Ali
>Akbar's music at it's serious and sober best that to my ear has yet to
>be matched by other sarod players. His 78s are hard to come by, but his
>45 rpm records are readily available on cassette (and maybe CD). There
>is some overwhelmingly beautiful music there and it is played without a
>blemish.
>
>Also some of Ali Akbar's most beautiful music IS accompanied by
>blemishes. Some of his old LPs come to mind as well as radio broadcasts.
>
Any recommedations for available, early recordings of Ali Akbar Khan? I have the
Signature Series on his own label -- I'm interested in earlier recordings.
Regards,
Brian Minsk
Jody Stecher
> It is not clear what you mean by "blemishes."
Right. I brought up the subject at the end of my post and my thinking was
not as clear as it could have been had I thought things through. I seem to
have used the word and the notion slightly differently in each of the last 3
paragraphs of my post. I also didn't make it clear that I prefer to listen
to vocal music even though I am an instrumentalist and that I don't
personally mind the *blemishes* I claim certain recordings are with or
without.
By *blemishes* I (mostly) meant sounds that are not intended to be part of
the music, including those that would have been avoided if the artist had
his druthers, but occured either by accident (fingers slipped or unexpected
belch) or deliberately to enable better music (clearing throat and
producing a few seconds of noise to ensure better singing than would occur
had the throat not been cleared, or string tuned to ensure correct
intonation.) In response to implicit claims that Ali Akbar Khan had always
been a sloppy player I had written that his early recordings such as the
Asavari you commended in an earlier post were *without a blemish*. In that
paragraph I meant the music was clearly conceived and articulated and I said
so in prose that may have been neither. I then brought the notion of
*blemish* forward in the ensuing paragraphs, hinted that some of Ali
Akbar's best music is not pristine at all moments, and ended by asking a
generalized question about attitudes towards vocalists and instrumentalists.
I was testing a half-baked notion that more leeway is granted to vocalists.
> If by that you mean going besurA then it is not looked upon too kindly either
in vocalists or instrumentalists.
understood.
> But the context is important. Is it just theodd slip-up in an otherwise
solid performance of is it chronic? If
> the former it hardly matters in most instances unless the false step
> is so egregious that it generates an unshakeable unpleasant feeling.
good point. Maybe that's why I can enjoy recordings of the elderly
Krishnarao Shankar Pandit and SC Arolkar, both of whom go seriously besurA
from time to time, but have zero tolerance for 90% of the jhala of either
Ali Akbar or Amjad, not because of pitch problems but because it's
so....so... what do I mean to say?.....so damned noisy!
JS
Ramu
Sajjad Khaliq
: Why is it that many ICM listeners will tolerate any amount of coughing and
: throat clearing and phlegm adjustment from vocalists but are hostile to the
: non-vocal equivalent from instrumentalists? Just curious.
Because it adds to the real live experience.
Jody Stecher
human and living? more so than the relatively mechanical adjustments of an
instrumentalist? This is a good answer as to the first part of my question,
why the audience (in which I include myself) is not perturbed by vocalists'
*sounds*, but not as to why they (in which I do not include myself) seem to
be less than enthusiastic about an instrumentalist's static. Anyway I may be
wrong in my premise. Thanks for responding.
Best wishes to all during this painful time,
Jody Stecher