The Enchanting age old Sarangi and the young Maestro Kamal Sabri.
 
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Sunday, January 5, 2002
Sabri makes excellent music

Kamal Sabri

He is excited about the website which he launched two months back while expounding elaborately on Indian traditions. Sarangi player Kamal Sabri is the quintessential musician of today, a perfect blend of the East and the West, who had solo recital at the IIC on Jan. 1 as part of the World Music Concert. Kamal Sabri represents the seventh generation of the sarangi players of the Sainia Gharana of Rampur.

His father Padamshri Ustad Sabri Khan has taught him the nuances of playing the instrument in a very traditional way, but Kamal’s rendering is not restricted to that as he constantly likes to use experiment, a trend found among today’s world-class musicians.
  I believe in world music. I am planning to have four concerts with Finnish folk artists soon,” says the sarangi player who has had the honour of participating in the 24-hour Millennium Concert in Paris to ring in the new millennium.

Kamal had not aspired to be a sarangi player, he wanted to dabble in films but destiny had something else in store for him. “Mine must be the most ugly fingers that you could see. That is because sarangi is played with cuticles. We have to hold and push a certain string while the bow is moved back and forth to play a particular raag or sound. That is why I feel that sarangi is the most difficult instrument to play,” says the youngest solo artist of this instrument. Once he got serious about sarangi, Kamal undertook a course in communications in London so that he could “make the westerners understand my music and instrument. We are in an age of global music where we all have access to the best music going around us. And this is also an opportune time to put our traditional music on the world map (not that it requires too much effort thanks to our talented predecessors),” says the commerce graduate who loves A. R. Rahman’s compositions in popular music. He might like to follow Rahman’s footsteps, but not right now since he wants to focus only on the traditional renditions. “Later, probably.”

Inshallah!

 

 

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