Iinvited by Safia
Beyg of Sampurna to see the musical performance of a sarangi
nawaz from India, I walked into the Alliance Francaise auditorium
bang in the middle of Kamal Sabri's performance. He was
rather dazzling but then again it was the first time I heard
the samngi played live. And of course, since there are a
handful of sarangi players left in the world, one does,
there is hardly a yardstick to measure the performances
by. However, 1 guess one can trust their ears and here is
what mine told me.
Kamal Sabri knew
what he was doing, as he moved from one mag to another,
the mood of room would change. From the ebb and flow beauty
of Raag Malkaus to the joyous verve and super fast wizardry
of a tappa, Kamal Sabri played his heart out. The only impediment
in his path was a rather old tabla player who obviously
did not know what he was doing. I don't know what he was
doing' wrong, I only know that it didn't sound right. When
I went home that noight I put on a CD of sarangi nawaz Ustad
Sultan Khan with tabla whiz Zakir Hussain and listened to
two musicians who managed to be in sunc even as they conflicted.
And who managed to come together in that joyous climax that
is unique to sub-continental classical music. Kamal Sabri
and the old but incompetent tabla player were unable to
climax, but Kamal was impressive. His playing managed to
give me goosebumps like the Thoughts and Beats CD of Sultan
Khan and Zakir Hussain. Kamal is an interesting subject
for scrutiny. He's young, 25 years old to be exact, he comes
from the Sainia Gharana of music and is seventh in line
of a family tree that shows sarangi players from top to
bottom. He has a rather modern outlook because of his age,
but at the same time tradition is very close to his heart.
He learnt under the tutelage of his father, Ustad Sabri
Khan, who is a progressive sarangi player and has won the
Padmashree award in India. Homegrown, but open to ideas,
Ustad Sabri Khan has played with Pandit Ravi Shankar and
Yehudi Menuhin from the classical lot and with The Beatles
and even with (surprise, surprise) Blind Melon, the great
band from Seattle with the ill-fated singer who did a lot
of drugs and died young. Such incidents do not plague classical
musicians whose music is such a high for them that they
rarely indulge in substance abuse.
Kamal started
training at the age of six, so he is a veteran with twenty
years of playing behind him. "My father tells me that when
I was a toddler and he was playing at home, I would crawl
over and touch the gaz (bow). He knew then that this instrument
fascinated me. My grandfather gave me a small sarangi when
I was five. I tried it on my own and the noises it made
were so scary that I put it down," recalls Kamal with a
laugh. The sarangi is evocative when it is tuned and sounds
horrific when it is not. It has the power to make you cry
and it can make you happy. The sarangi is probably the most
difficult instrument to master in the world. "My father
says that this life is not enough for me to learn the sarangi
and anyway, the day a musician thinks that he knows it all
is the day he dies," says Kamal, touching his instrument
with reverence.
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Kamal maintains that music is
worship to him. "Ustad ho kaamil, shagird ho aamil aur Khuda
ho shaamil" (the teacher should be able, the student should
be capable of following his instruction and God must be part
of the proceedings) is a saying that he has heard since he
was a child. So he is scandalised when he hears that music
is deemed by some to be haraam in the land of the pure. "As
a classical musician, I can't jump around on stage to attract
the attention of the audience. The only thing about me that
can appeal to them is the quality of the raag I am playing.
I always pray to God to keep my music pure and true," says
Kamal simply. He talks about the necessity of taseer in music.
It is necessary for music to affect the listener. If it doesn't,
then the musician might as well not play.
Kamal's values are
derived from the Indian guru-shishya parampara that in Pakistan
is the ustad-shagird dastoor. That in English may be translated
as the teacher-student relationship, but that would be simplifying
matters a bit. Kamal was lucky to be born with a musical silver
spoon in his mouth into a gharana with a father who could
teach him. He says that even I can go to Delhi to learn from
his father. All I have to do is express the urge to learn
from him. He will then tie a thread around my right hand to
signify the bond that has been forged and all I give in return
is some cloth or a box of sweets perhaps. Then, the ustad
is encumbent to teach me as much as he knows subject only
to what I can learn. "It is not like the West, where you pay
for an education and even if you are not willing to learn,
you go to class, doze for a while and come back. There is
no room for laziness in an ustad-shagird relationship. All
you have to have is a zeal to learn," says Kamal who endorses
this mode of education for music.
This is the tradition
that Kamal comes from and is upholding. He, like his father,
has taken his art to the West and has dabbled in fusion music
with a host of musicians from places like Sweden, Finland
and Barbados. While purists may feel that fusion mutates classical
music, Kamal knows that the only way to save the sarangi from
extinction is to popularise it. He wants to do for the sarangi
what Pandit Ravi Shankar did for the sitar and Zakir Hussain
did for the tabla. Only by going to the West is the worth
of these instruments realised in the East. What Kamal has
in his favour is that he is based in India and not in Pakistan,
where his art might just have withered away and died.
India remains a land of opportunity for classical musicians.
There, music is promoted and musicians sent abroad. Kamal's
father performs often enough in the West and goes off periodically
to teach classical music at the UCLA. Wjile here, the fate
of excellent classical musicians like Bashir Khan Kalia, Tafu,
Kader Baksh Pakhawaji, Ustad Shaggan and many unsung but singing
maestros hangs in balance. Not so for Kamal Sabri, a Muslim
musician in India who might not be as talented as the aforementioned
people but he has so much more scope.
"There is more opportunity
in the West partly because there is hardly any classical music
there and partly because nowadays they have an obsession with
all things Indian," laughs Kamal who is making waves there
while the sunshines. His proudest moment was playing with
Zakir Hussain at the Royal Albert Hall in London. That not
the half of it. After all, Kamal Sabri has only just begun.
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