A Sense of ‘Ah’

I owe something to Rahul Sharma’s music and I hope with this write-up I can make me owe him a little more. Rahul Sharma’s santoor is as profound and lively as his albums are experimental. Time Traveler a 2005 presentation is like a vagabound traveler’s journey across time with eight musically programmed tracks. I am not particularly fond of fusion, because, done hurriedly; it may sound kitsch. However, a track in this album - ‘1960- Travelling to New Orleans,’ where jazz instruments warps itself around the pahari sounds of the santoor creates a perfect jugalbandi. The rhythm instruments are tabla and drums. Livid in their presence, the tabla sometimes and quite strangely, plays first fiddle to the main instrument.

Often when I listen to Rahul Sharma’s encores I feel like I am cycling full tilt on a kacchi guli in a nondescript Indian village with the wind raking in my hair. It is fluid and extraordinarily beautiful. A feat that he achieves in this album is to transcend the boundaries of the santoor as a Kashmiri folk instrument to give it a universal flavour of a saxophone. Strange, often tangled, and unearthly beautiful. I found in his music all rights and pleasures due to me, even though the disturbance of new age instrumentals was sometimes a bit off, but finding it's own space in the entanglement. I have often heard that musicians have the power to transcend their bodies and lift their mental beings to a state of suspension; it is like spoonfuls of honey into the gullies of the mind. That is how dear readers I would define an ‘out of the body kind of an experience’ with my banality.

I went for a similar concert at Max Mueller Bhavan by Tanmoy Bose a few years back, where he created a bizarre yet poignant mix of an Indian instrument like the ‘dhak’ and a western instrument like ‘brazilian drums.’ The audience grew from a dwindling crowd of five to six people to an auditorium full of listeners, people who could hardly attend their language classes downstairs. The rhythm interfused in my mind a number of extra-musical memories. Something I would fail to describe in words. Out of my right mind!