Scintillating Sax (2003)
7 tracks, 58 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes (both under the re-released title of Saxophone)
You may not know, but in a former life, I was a saxophonist. Not an amazing one, but I was alright, and that was quite a big part of my identity for a while. Because of this, when I listened to music from other cultures, I naturally gravitated towards the sax players. That’s easy enough when listening to Latin music, and even a lot of African music, but when I heard that there was an Indian person who used the saxophone to make Indian classical music, you know I was there in a flash.
Kadri Gopalnath is a musician from the Karnataka, the source of the South Indian classical discipline known as Karnatic music, and that’s what he plays. Although he plays it on the alto saxophone, it doesn’t always sound like one; Karnatic music doesn’t have a tradition of sax players, but it does have a tradition of nagaswaram players – that’s a long double-reeded shawm (similar to an oboe). Gopalnath’s father was a master of the nagaswaram, and it seems Gopalnath carried on that family line, albeit with one reed instead of too. That gives an interesting angle to his playing which results in little idiosyncrasies: for example, he doesn’t use his tongue to start or finish the air flow into his instrument like a Western sax player does, giving each note a slightly less defined feeling and making the long, snaking melodies blend into one.
Not only was this my first time for hearing an Indian saxophonist, I’m pretty sure it was the first time I’d consciously heard Karnatic music too. Twice as new! Although Karnatic and Hindustani (North Indian) classical music have lots of similarities, especially in terms of music theory, they sound very different. Karnatic music is heavily ornamented in a unique way, in which even a simple melody can be transformed into rapid runs of notes dancing around and in between the ‘core’ notes. There’s also the ensemble: the Hindustani set-up is usually a solo singer or instrumentalist, an accompanist on harmonium or sarangi (if the soloist is a singer) playing a repeating motif, tabla and one or two tambura providing drones; in Karnatic music, the solo musician is joined by other musicians who follow the soloist’s melodies and improvisations a split-second after it is played, giving a strange sort of echo effect. On this album, Gopalnath takes the lead of course, and he is shadowed by A. Kanyakumari on violin. It makes it sound even more uncanny, and even less like a saxophone. There’s also a very different rhythm section, here made up of mridangam (a double-ended barrel drum), ghatam (a clay pot) and morsing (a jew’s harp); the size of the percussion section shows the importance of rhythm within Karnatic music too. The tambura is still there, though. Good ol’ tambura.
Through all this, there is an irresistible jazziness to Gopalnath’s playing, although I’m not actually sure if that is a legitimate element to his music or whether I’m only hearing that because I expect to – saxophone and all that. He has worked with jazz musicians in the past and since, but the programme here is a strict selection of classical music. There’s just something about those incredibly fast, intricate runs of notes that dart this way and that that has something incredibly bebop about it. Take a listen and decide for yourself.
Listening to Kadri Gopalnath for the very first time was a confusing experience. This was a saxophonist playing a saxophone like I’d never heard it before, and using it to make Indian classical music in a way that I’d never heard before either. You know I definitely tried to play in that way on my own saxophone and obviously completely failed. There is still something odd about hearing a saxophone in this context, but in Gopalnath’s hands you’d think the instrument had been part of the tradition for centuries.
No comments:
Post a Comment