D. Bhattacharya: Hindustani Slide Guitar -Philly, April 5th

Jim Cohen · From: Philadelphia, PA

Saturday, April 5 at 7:30 pm
DEBASHISH BHATTACHARYA: HINDUSTANI SLIDE GUITAR
at Calvary Church, 48th Street and Baltimore Avenue

"You will likely never hear better acoustic slide playing than this. Using the centuries-old raga tradition, Bhattacharya takes the listener to a place of deep emotional expression beyond the boundaries of time." Henry Kaiser, Acoustic Guitar Magazine

Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya is perhaps the greatest slide guitarist in India. Born into a Kolkata (Calcutta) musical family in 1963, he began playing Hawaiian lap steel guitar at three, performed on All India Radio at four, and spent his childhood and adolescence studying Western guitar, sitar, esraj, and singing styles. At 21, he was the first slide guitarist to receive the President of India Award and became a disciple of Pandit Brij Bhushan Khabra, a pioneer of Indian slide guitar, with whom he studied for a decade. He has also studied with the eminent vocalist Ajoy Chakraborty and with Ustad Ali Akbar Khan.

While Western audiences are most familiar with the use of slide guitar in Hindustani (North Indian) classical music through Ry Cooder’s collaborations with Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, the instrument was first brought to India in the early 20th century by the influential Hawaiian guitarist Tau Moe. One of his students taught Pandit Brij Bhushan Kabra, the pioneer who incorporated slide guitar into improvised ragas and eventually became Bhattacharya’s musical guru. Bhattacharya himself is a major innovator, not only as a performer but also as a designer: his “Trinity of Guitars” includes a hollow-necked 22-string guitar with four additional tones, a 14-string guitar that combines features from the Western 12-string guitar with the veena, bowed sarangi and santoor (Persian hammered dulcimer), and a slide ukulele. At this performance, Debashish Bhattacharya will be accompanied by his brother Subhasis on tabla and by his sister, vocalist Sutapa Bhattacharjee.

Subhasis Bhattacharya, Debashish’s younger brother, is a leader of his generation of Indian percussionists. He started to make his presence felt in the music scene from childhood as a promising tabla player trained by teachers Sri Prabir Bhattacharya and Pt. Shyamal Bose. Now considered a master player, he continues to study with the senior tabla maestro Pandit Anindo Chatterjee. He has regularly performed in every major Indian music festival, and has recorded four albums with Debashish and seven albums with Pandit Ajoy Chakrabarty.
Subhasis first toured outside of India in 1996 with Debashish and Bob Brozman. His skill and flexibility as percussionist on several instruments, rhythm arranger, and vocalist have since been heard on subsequent overseas tours in the USA, Canada, South Africa, Greece, Kuwait, Bangladesh, and Nepal. A leading studio musician in India, he has begun creating and leading large percussion ensembles, and his arranging skills are essential to the music on this album, as an equal participant in its creation. With meticulously tuned hand drums, he played intricate rhythms, plus melodic parts inside the rhythm section. Creating percussion landscapes by playing several instruments on multiple tracks gave Subhashis a sense of liberty, yielding one creative explosion after another.

Vocalist Sutapa Bhattacharjee, the sister of Debashish and Subhasis, has clearly inherited the vocal genes of generations of Bhattacharyas. With a master’s degree in music, she has spent her life as a vocalist and teacher of music. Capable of singing fluently in the 10 most well-known languages in India, she sings most genres of Indian music, from classical and semi-classical to traditional folk songs to film songs, both classic and contemporary. On tours with Debashish and Subhasis, she has astounded audiences and musicians alike by matching Debashish’s lightning-fast guitar melodies note-for-note with her voice. Her 2002 release, JETE JETE, placed among the top 10 Bangla albums of the year, positioning Sutapa foremost among artists in her genre in India.

Extensive streaming audio recordings can be found at:
http://www.herschelfreemanagency.com/debashish/debashish.html

For more information on Debashish Bhattacharya:
http://www.debashishbhattacharya.com/

David Doggett · Posted 1 Apr 2008 8:27 pm

I went to this venue for the African music last weekend. It's a round room with really nice acoustics. Should be a great show. There are several Vietnamese and Indian restaurants in the same block or nearby.

Dave Van Allen · From: Doylestown, PA , US , Earth

dang- I'm out of town...

Jim Cohen · From: Philadelphia, PA

Tooonights's the Niiiight...!

I'iiiiillll be Theeeere....

Jim Cohen · From: Philadelphia, PA

Wow!! What an incredible concert! Just Debashish, his brother on tabla, and his sister on vocals. Amazing sound, amazing effects, astounding right hand...

I'll try to post some photos of his guitars later on too; he designed them himself to be a hybrid between a guitar and a sitar, with multiple sympathetic strings that he keeps going with the dance of his right hand while improvising very fast and tricky melodies over the ragas. Ya gotta see and hear this man.

The Philadelphia-area lap steel and slide guitar community turned out in force for the concert. David Doggett and I ran into each other there. (By the way, David, I did catch a bit of Harold Smith's set at O'Hara's afterwards. You're right, he is a really fine jazz drummer.)

Jim Cohen · From: Philadelphia, PA

I apologize for the poor photo quality but these were taken with my cellphone. Gorgeous instruments, these.

Darrell Urbien · From: Echo Park, California

The small one (Anandi) was originally designed and built by Canadian luthier Michael Dunn, as a child-sized mini-Weissenborn. I guess Bhattacharya is having them made now in India. He sure plays the heck out of it!

Could you tell if the one he was playing was an Indian one, or did it still have Dunn's label visible through the soundhole (like the one on Bhattacharya's website)?

Jim Cohen · From: Philadelphia, PA

Darrell, I couldn't get close enough to tell.

Ron Whitfield · From: Kaaawa, Hawaii, USA

We'll be getting them over here again soon, as well.

It's 'interesting' to watch as a standard steel player sits in with these guys. I witnessed our Alan Akaka do this on two occassions, with the first being a mess and the following weeks show a vastly improved jam with Alan impressively finding his way thru a very difficult situation of marrying Hawaiian with Indian steel, in improv.

David Doggett · Posted 7 Apr 2008 4:04 pm

One interesting aspect of the performance was the replacement of the traditional tanpura (aka tambura) player with an electronic tanpura. The tanpura is a simple fretless drone instrument with 4 strings tuned 1 8 8 5 (tanpura). It is retuned for each song, so the tonic fits the appropriate key of the vocalist or lead instrument. It is used to provide a repetitive drone arpeggio of 1 5 8, which thus sets the pitch and meter for all the other instruments.

The electronic tanpura is a small box that repetitively sounds the 1 5 8 arpeggio. It also reproduces the flange sound of the strings buzzing on the bridge. A twist of a dial changes the tonic pitch for each song. It's sort of like replacing the bass and rhythm guitar with Band in the Box. Smile

Jim Cohen · From: Philadelphia, PA

An interesting historical note: the steel guitar first arrived in India around 1929 from, guess where... Hawaii, about the same time that it made it to mainland USA. And, very similar to the USA, Hawaiian steel guitar became a big craze during the 1940s in INDIA !! The Hawaiian musician who brought it to India was Tao Moe, who passed away as recently as 2004 (the same year in which Debashish finally got to meet him).

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