Thursday, December 17, 2009

The 52nd Grammy Awards nominees: Contemporary world music

Nominees for "The Best Contemporary World Music Album--Vocal or Instrumental" are the subject of today's preview of the upcoming Grammy Awards, as distinct from the "traditional' cagegory in my previous blog.

The first album to be nominated is "Welcome to Mali", by Amadou and Mariam on the Nonesuch label. The couple met in the 1970's when they were both students in the Malian capital of Bamako at the Institute for Young Blind People, and have released well over a dozen albums since. This particular entry features a number of prominent guest artists, taking the album beyond purely Malian pop music. On one track, Amadou sings in French to the English lyrics of K’Naan, a Somali-born rapper now living in Toronto (he appeared earlier this year in the Kennedy Center's Arabesque Festival, and can be seen in a streaming video on their Website). Another cut features instrumental input from Malian kora master Toumani Diabaté (see the previous entry, in which his cousin and sometime disciple Mamadou Diabaté has also been nominated for his kora performance). Leading Nigerian guitarist and singer-songwriter Keziah Jones joins the duo on the albums title track. You can go to the Nonesuch Website to listen to excerpts from each of the 11 items

The protean master of the banjo, Béla Fleck is nominated yet again for a Grammy (he's already received seven) through his "Throw Down Your Heart: Tales from the Acoustic Planet, vol. 3 - Africa Sessions" on Rounder Records. The twelve tracks incorporate a wide range of African singing and isntrumental styles, and are apparently drawn from Fleck's preparation of a 2009 documentary film, "Throw Down Your Heart: Bela Fleck Brings the Banjo Back to Africa". Samples from this extraordinary CD, which was also nominated this year in the "Best Pop Instrumental Performance" category for the title track, can be heard here.

The African domination of this Grammy category continues with "Day by Day", by Femi Kuti, son of the late superstar Fela Kuti (1938-1997), who was a towering figure in the vanguard in the development of Afropop music, as well as a major Nigerian activist. Previously nominated for a Grammy in 2003, Femi Kuti presents 12 tracks with varied rhythms and instrumentation, and songs with lyrics carrying a range of messages, as in the title song: "Day by Day, by night by night, we work and pray for peace to reign . . . . " Tracks from the album, released by Mercer Street Records can be sampled here.

Next comes "Seya", by Oumou Sangaré, like Amadou and Mariam above, from Mali, and also on the Nonesuch label. An outspoken feminist and businesswoman, her original songs, while maintaining a strongly African character, embrace a range of styles and instrumentation, with frequent use of the traditional solo vocal call from Sangaré's powerful voice, and a chorus responding in unison. Further information on the album, as well as samples from each of the 11 tracks, is available on the Nonesuch Website. As noted there, Sangaré, like Amadou and Mariam above, collaborates with an international cast of guest artists, including a saxophonist, Alfred "Pee Wee Ellis", and a trombonist, Fred Wesley, who have both worked with James Brown, and Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, who was Fela Kuti’s musical director.

The final nominee in this Grammy category is "Across the Divide: A Tale of Rhythm and Ancestry" by Omar Sosa, on Half Note Records. While Sosa himself hails from Cuba, the titles of several of the tracks show a clear connection to Africa: "Promised Land", "Across Africa (The Dream)" and "Across Africa (Arrival), and "Ancestors". Brief audio excerpts from all the album's pieces, as well as a listing of the album's personnel, can be found here.

I am particularly pleased with the nomination of this CD, given that I had encountered it in the course of writing a previous blog on a totally unrelated subject, the music of Andalusia. Describing a fascinating one-man Website that I had discovered in the course of pursuing that topic, I wrote of one particularly obsessive experience on the Website, cdRoots.com ("music from the road less traveled . . . "):

"The soundstream of the "Listen" tab [on the Web page] leads into a haunting song emerging mysteriously from the aether of the Internet, "Guide me O thou great Jehovah" (lyrics on www.cyberhymnal.org!), sung in what sounds like a Scottish brogue against a slow ostinato of just two alternating clustered piano chords, presently joined by a languid drum set background accenting the third beat of four, then moving into a luminous improvisation on the piano of melting jazz harmonies. . . .

"The song takes possession of me, and my old compulsion resurfaces: I MUST find out who the artist(s) is(are). WHERE I can find the recording? WHAT inspired the artist(s)?"

Well, tonight I find out what that recording is, to my great delight. You can learn more about it by acessing a fascinating trailer on YouTube, posted on behalf of Half Note records, describing the origins of this remarkable album, which included the collaboration of ethnomusicologist Tim Eriksen, whose haunting recitation of the hymn had first seized my ear, and who is himself a performer on the banjo, among other instruments.

Monday, December 14, 2009

The 52nd Grammy Awards nominees: Traditional world music

Earlier this month, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) announced the nominations for the 52nd annual Grammy Awards. A number of the nominated recordings included examples of the general field of "world music", and two categories were specifically dedicated to that niche: "Best Traditional World Music Album--Vocal or Instrumental", and "Best Contemporary World Music Album--Vocal or Instrumental." Today's posting is on the first category.

I'm personally acquainted with one of the nominees--Amjad Ali Khan--and had corresponded and spoken in past years on the telephone with his collaborator, Rahim Alhaj; their joint album "Ancient Sounds" on the UR Music label, was the first item in the traditional category, and I'm eager to hear the complete CD; as noted below, audition of brief samples brought some misgivings.

Following the death earlier in the year of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Amjad Ali Khan is now widely recognized as the world's greatest living master of the sarod, a traditional Indian metal-stringed instrument with a skin head and a fretless metal neck. Rahim Alhaj, originally from Iraq and based since 1991 in the U.S. following the Gulf War, performs on the ancient Arab oud (also 'ud), or fretless lute (the western term lute in fact derives from the Arabic name al-'ud), which normally in the contemporary era has nylon or metal-wound-on-nylon strings.

The album consists of seven cuts, featuring the two musicians playing alternately in solo and duet. Brief samples can be heard here.

The second nominated album, entitled "Double Play", features Liz Carroll on the fiddle and John Doyle on the guitar in 13 expertly performed songs and instrumental pieces fashioned in the traditional Irish style. The music could certainly be classified as well in the folk music category, but perhaps was included here because of the fact that it is distinctly Irish in character, as opposed to indeterminate folk. The duo, who were both born in the U.S. and had well-established careers before joining forces, performed for President Obama on St. Patrick's Day in 2009. The Website for Compass Records, which released "Double Play", has a more extensive writeup on the artists (scroll down the main page). Click here for samples.

The third contending album in this category is "Douga Mansa", featuring Mamadou Diabaté from the West African nation of Mali, performing on a World Village release on the traditional West African 21-stringed kora, a harp-like chordophone whose sound body is made from half a calabash (bottle gourd) covered with a cowskin head. Excerpts of the CD's 13 cuts, which include a duet performance with a flute, can be heard here. I have been listening to kora music now for nearly 50 years (beginning with a treasured LP from my high-school days featuring Les Ballets Africain, established by the Guinean choreographer Keita Fodeba), and find the performances here both distinguished and accomplished examples of the kora tradition.

Next comes "La Guerra No", by the California-born John Santos and his El Coro Folklórico Kindembo, an Afro-Latin percussion and choral ensemble with extraordinary energy. Samples of all 13 tracks are on the album's Web page on CD Baby, the world's largest direct distributor of individually produced CDs (of which more in a subsequent blog posting).

Finally we have "Drum Music Land", an entry from a Taiwanese percussion ensemble, the Ten Drum Art Percussion Group, led by Taiwan-based producer Chin-tai Judy Wu, and recorded in several of the group's international tours by engineering wizard and Grammy Award winner Kavichandran Alexander, founder of the legendary audiophile label, Waterlily Acoustics, and to my good fortune, a personal friend for many years. Excerpts from the album's five tracks (with such evocative titles like "Riding Winds and Breaking Waves" and "Bragging Cock") can be heard on its CDBaby Web page, which also has a brief historical description of the group.

The five entries are certainly diverse in nature, both musically and geographically. I've not had a chance to listen to any of the albums in their entirety, but find the available excerpts certainly captivating--with the exception of the sarod-oud collaboration, which to my ear sounds oddly out of tune when the two instruments are playing together, given that Indian ragas and Arabic maqams scales are radically different in their intonation and melodic structures. The brief examples I was able to hear of the duet portions brought to mind the trenchant comment from the late Ustad Ali Akbar Khan: "fusion is con-fusion. . . . . " But I'll reserve final judgment until I've had the chance to listen to all the albums in their entirety.

Coming up: Nominees for the Best Contemporary World Music Album.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Music in outer space?

In 1977, two Voyager spacecraft were launched as interplanetary and ultimately interstellar probes for research. Both Voyagers also carried, among other representations of life on earth, a "Golden Record", which included musical selections from cultures around the world, as well as from the western classical, jazz, and popular traditions.

Over the weekend, an old friend was visiting as houseguest, and as we were discussing various things, I learned that, at the request of the late Carl Sagan, the late Robert E. Brown, a mutual friend and eminent ethnomusicologist, had made the selection of world music (Brown is popularly credited with coining the term) for the Golden Record from countries including Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, China, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, New Guinea, Peru, Senegal, the Solomon Islands, and Zaire, as well as the Navajo Nation in the U.S. As my friend and I discussed the music, I was pleased to learn that included was a recording of Kesarbai Kerkar, one of the legendary vocalists of Indian classical music. You can listen to her performance, in a morning raga, Bhairavi, from an old 78 rpm record, as well as to all the other selections, on the Website www.goldenrecord.org.

In this blog's May Day Manifesto, we asked why music is such a central aspect of our day-to-day existence. As regards the Voyager mission, it is significant that, of all possible expressions of human culture and art, music was selected as being the most compelling manifestation of our civilization.

If you had the choice of recordings to be included in a subsequent such project, what would be the three musical examples at the top of your list?

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Recent VOAMusic features

VOA's music reporters recently filed the following reports on music:

Lady Gaga, the stage name for Stefani Germanotta, appears in a video interview in the VOA studios by Larry London. She discusses her smash debut CD, The Fame Monster, which alone has produced four Number One Billboard Pop Songs chart hits. This achievement set a new record, overtaking albums by Ace of Base and Avril Lavigne, each having three songs in that category from a single CD. For her album, the artist received nominations for nine MTV Awards, and for five American Music Awards, including Artist of the Year. It is interesting to note that three different versions were released--regular, deluxe, and limited. Click here to listen to samples.

The National World War II Museum in New Orleans is the subject of another VOA video feature, focusing on a stage presentation of the music and dance of that era. In his report, Greg Flakus interviews the Museum's Entertainment Manager, Victoria Reed, who says the museum's theater, the Stage Door Canteen, was modeled on establishments of the same name created in various American cities and abroad for lonely U.S. servicemen during the war. The piece includes several examples of 1940's music and dance.

Carrie Underwood, who was the year's finalist in the 2005 season of the blockbuster TV series Americal Idol, has released her third CD, Play On, which is her third album in a row to debut (in the first week of its release) at Number One on Billboard's Country music chart. Listen to Mary Morningstar's radio report on the CD; excerpts from the tracks from the album can be heard here.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Kayhan Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider: a partial review

Earlier this month, Kayhan Kalhor, master of the Persian kamancheh (spike fiddle), performed with Brooklyn Rider, an adventurous and groundbreaking string quartet, at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

The kamancheh is a member of the class of musical string instruments known as spike fiddles, in that they are played with a bow, but held upright with the instrument resting on a spike that extends to the ground. Varieties of the spike fiddle, more commonly known in some variant of the word rebab, are found from North Africa all across the Middle East and Asia to Indonesia; the instrument also occurs in greatly altered form as the rebec in medieval European music.

As such, the kamancheh shares a number of similarities in sound, timbre, and technique to the instruments of the western string quartet: the violin, the viola, and the cello. Thus it was logical, in the era of world music, for Kalhor to collaborate with Brooklyn Rider, one of the more adventurous contemporary string quartet ensembles, which is "is devoted both to the interpretation of existing quartet literature and to the creation of new works."

Friday, November 20, 2009

Tim Westergren of Pandora Internet Radio: Interview

Earlier in the year Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora Radio, was in Washington for a "Town Hall Meeting" with listeners, and he was generous enough to come to the VOA studios amidst his day's busy schedule for an interview.

For those of you unfamiliar with Pandora, it is the world's largest Internet radio "station", with well over 15 million listeners, according to Westergren.


I asked Tim about the origins of the name, which is certainly evocative:


When I asked what prompted him to found Pandora, he explained that the origins of the company came out of his own experience, serving as a band member, and later a film composer, when the taxonomy of music (see my earlier post on this topic) became a central preoccupation:



Thursday, November 12, 2009

VOAMusic blog joins VOAWorldMusic!

The Voice of America has a substantial amount of music programming scattered among its various operations. When I launched the VOAWorldMusic blog last year, I also started a separate blog, VOAMusic, that attempted to highlight on a single site, updated regularly, as much of VOA's music programming as possible. That effort was discontinued last summer for a variety of reasons, with the promise of joining the broader role of this blog site--a commitment that I'm now happy to undertake.

Recent VOA music stories:

See Amra Alirejsovic's video report from Washington on a multimedia music project, named Playing for Change, started by music producer Mark Johnson. Johnson explains its purpose, along with a video of various musicians, in the Introduction page of its Website:

"Playing for Change is a multimedia movement created to inspire, connect, and bring peace to the world through music. The idea for this project arose from a common belief that music has the power to break down boundaries and overcome distances between people. No matter whether people come from different geographic, political, economic, spiritual or ideological backgrounds, music has the universal power to transcend and unite us as one human race. And with this truth firmly fixed in our minds, we set out to share it with the world."

The project, whose mission, stated above, is along similar lines to the purpose of this blog, also has a Facebook page, with over 80,000 fans.

VOA's veteran radio and television broadcaster Larry London produced a TV package on Ne-Yo, whose impressive career as an independent music producer highlights include five top 10 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, and two #1 albums. Click here for the Ne-Yo's own Web page, which includes samples of his music.

Friday, November 6, 2009

Falu's video interview from VOAWorldMusic

Falu, a.k.a. Falguni Shah, was kind enough to give me a television interview last year when she was in Washington as the opening act for the Pakistani supergroup Junoon (see my last posting, which promoed her 1 October concert at Joe's Pub in New York), and at that time my colleague Ravi Khanna produced a fine brief video feature based on my interview, with a short excerpt of "Copper Can", one of her most compelling songs.

Now that I've developed the necessary video editing ability, I'm happy to offer more extended portions of the interview, videotaped by the ever-capable Ilyas Khan of VOA's Urdu Service.

I began the interview by asking Falu who her first music teacher was:



In the course of her answer, after crediting her mother, Kishori Dalal, for her initial training, she refers to her next teacher, Ustad Sultan Khan. (The term "ustad", on one level, is roughly equivalent to "maestro" among Muslim musicians, and is used on another level to describe one's honored teacher, equivalent to "guru" among Hindu musicians.) She also appends the honorific "Sahib" after his name, again as a sign of respect. You may notice her touching her ear when she says his name--this, too, is a customary indication of humility when speaking of one's ustad or guru, or of some great musical figure of the past. (The gesture is distantly related to the practice in South Asia of having naughty children cross their arms and pull both ears, sometimes while bouncing up and down as though sitting on their heels, as penance for bad behavior. . . .)

Ustad Sultan Khan is one of the world's leading masters of the sarangi, a fiendishly difficult box fiddle with a skin head, four main strings, and up to 40 sympathetic strings, with a haunting sound and expressiveness close to that of the human voice--which accounts for the fact that it historically has been used to accompany classical vocalists, mimicking almost exactly their improvisations after a split second.

Falu next mentions that she studied singing in the purely classical style with Vandana Katti, a disciple (the customary word for lifetime student) of Kishori Amonkar, one of the greatest vocalists in the Hindustani (Northern South Asian) style of classical music. She represents the Jaipur gharana, or musical/hereditary tradition associated with the princely Indian city of Jaipur. (I'll have more to say on the phenomenon of gharana in a later post.)

Next I asked Falu whether she remembered her first lesson, playful or formal:



Demonstrating how she was taught as a baby being fed by her mother, she sings (very quickly) the seven basic notes of the basic musical scale, or sargam, prevalent in South Asia (the same basic musical system exists in Pakistan and Bangladesh as well, but in common parlance--and hereafter in this blog--the music is generally referred to as "Indian" music.). The word sargam is formed from the first three of the seven basic notes, Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni (Sa), which correspond roughly to the western Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti (Do). Click here for my more detailed description of the Indian sargam.)

She then sings the sargam--in a scale corresponding to the western major scale--shifted up one tone, in a musical process called modulation (key or chord change) in the west, but keeping the same names for the notes, since there is no absolute pitch in Indian music.

Then she changes the scale to that based on another mode or raga, Bhairav, with a flatted second (flat Re/Re) and sixth (flat Dha/La) and the rest of the notes natural. A raga is the format for the basic melodic structure in Indian music; click here for my brief definition of raga.

When I asked her what brought her to the U.S., she replied that while she felt extremely loyal to her classical Indian roots, she was attracted by western music and its various genres: jazz, blues, rock and pop, and the opportunities they offered her for innovation:



Knowing that improvisation is an integral part of Indian classical music, I was curious as to what circumstances led to her writing her first song. Her answer was immediate!



The next logical question was: "What was that first original song?"



Toward the end of her answer, I couldn't suppress a brief off-mike reference to "Both Sides Now", the seminal song by the legendary Joni Mitchell, and she agreed: "Yes, blame the clouds!"

She notes that the song was based on a classical raga, Bairagi Bhairav, a pentatonic (five-tone) raga, with the scale Sa Reb Ma Pa Nib (Sa) (Do Reb Fa Sol Tib (Do)--the "b" indicating the flat interval. In the course of the song, for a brief passage she actually sings the sargam of the scale, with the names of the notes as the words! (If I may be permitted a comment in my capacity of ethnomusicologist: the blending of Indian elements--including the raga--with a western pop sensibility and instrumental idiom in "Hey Baby" is stunningly effective, to the extend that no western listener is likely to hear anything foreign in the song, while at the same time someone familiar with South Asian classical music will most probably recognize immediately, at least subconsciously, the modal structure.)

Here is a brief audio example (used with permission) from "Hey Baby", in which she is actually singing the names of the notes--a common technique in a performance in the classical vocal style, khayal:



Finally, I referred to one reviewer's description of her as the happiest singer he had ever heard. Her response:




Sunday, November 1, 2009

From Lahore, Pakistan

After two weeks of intense musical activity in Pakistan, sponsored by the U. S. Department of State, my wife, Shubha Sankaran, and I are spending our last day awaiting a television interview by the Associated Press of Pakistan. Between various commitments and somewhat slow Internet access, I have chosen to complete as many assignments (performances, being interviewed, and interviewing) as possible, in giving something of a survey of classical South Asian music and its audience in Pakistan, and planning to post later in more detail once we return again to the U.S.

Highlights:

In Karachi, we were honored to participate in the observation of the 8th Annual Daniel Pearl World Music Days by performing in a concert sponsored by the U.S. Consulate. In addition, we gave a lecture-demonstration at the The National Academy of Performing Arts (NAPA) (their Website is under construction), and after performing at an off-campus seminar of The Aga Khan University (their Website is www.aku.edu), we subsequently heard an on-campus lecture on musical fusion efforts between Pakistani and Kenyan artists at, as well as a performance there by both classical vocalists and instrumentalists from a non-profit musical advocacy organization called sampurna (Website also under construction at www.sampurna.sdnpk.org).

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Reposting: Classical Music in Pakistan

Regarding music in Pakistan, I find myself very happily in that country once again on a musical mission, sponsored by the U. S. Department of State as part of their cultural outreach efforts: meeting other musicians, scholars, educators, students, and many old and wonderful friends. Having arrived early yesterday morning after three weeks of furious planning and a long sequence of international travel, and having moved immediately after arrival into a series meetings and interviews, this moment is literally (again, with the help of my usual insomnia, enriched by jet-lag--it's 3:03 am here in Pakistan . . . ) the first time I have had a chance to return to this blog. Since I should still try to get a little sleep before an equally busy day begins, I would like to repost my earlier musing on "Classical Music in Pakistan" as my first offering from this amazing country I have visited so many times, and where my wife Shubha and I have so many friends and well-wishers:

(Originally posted 11 October 2008):

"Earlier this year, an e-mail from Pakistan brought the sad news of the death at the early age of 59 of Adam Nayyar, described in an announcement from UCLA Professor Emerita Hiromi Lorraine Sakata as "Pakistan's foremost cultural anthropologiest, ethnomusicologist, and cultural interlocutor."

"While I only met Adam once, I'm using this occasion to begin the first of a series of entries on the classical music of Pakistan, spurred by the e-mail, mentioned above, from a musical colleague I had not met, Riaz Ahmed Barni, who is associated with an interesting Website,www.sadarang.com, which is devoted to traditional South Asian classical music as performed in Pakistan.

"My first full awareness of the state of traditional music in Pakistan was given to me by the late Khwaja Khurshid Anwar (1912-84), a major figure in Pakistani film music who also dedicated a good part of his later life to championing the cause of classical music in Pakistan. Facing the dilemma of what to call this music, he originated the unique yet comprehensive phrase "Ahang-e-Khusravi", or the "the music of Khusrau", referring to the thirteenth-century polymath Amir Khusrau, who is mythically credited with the origination of the sitar, the tabla, qavvali music, and Urdu poetry, among other important cultural expressions.

"As Khwaja Khurshid Anwar (hereafter used with the honorific "Sahib") explained to me when we first met in 1976, the music could not be called "Indian music" for obvious political reasons, nor could it be properly named "Pakistani music", because Pakistan had been in existence only since 1947--whereas the origins of the music, as currently practiced, date back to medieval times. His dilemma was complicated by the fact that most Pakistanis, simply associating the music with historical connections with Hinduism, were unaware of the enormous contributions that Muslim musicians had made to the development of this music over the centuries.

"In order to work for the continued patronage and recogniction of this music, Khwaja Sahib established the Classical Music Research Cell in collaboration with the late Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-84), arguably the greatest post-Independence Urdu poet. Together they established a library and archive which still exists in the offices of Radio Pakistan. But perhaps most significantly, they released through the recording company, EMI Pakistan, two important series of long-playing discs. The first, "Ragamala" ["garland of ragas"], presented the melodic structure of a hundred ragas along with brief performances in khayal style (the dominant form of South Asian classical vocal music) by Pakistan's leading vocalists. The second, "Gharanon ki Gayaki ["the vocal music of the historical traditions"], presented 80 of these ragas in more extended (10 minute) renditions by the same major vocalists.

"Both series--featuring the incomparable melodic accompaniment on the sarangi and rhythmic accompaniment on the tabla by Pakistan's leading masters of these instruments--were subsequently released on cassette, but are now unfortunately out of print. Yet these recordings present the best and most comprehensive anthology of khayal performances by Pakistani Ustads (masters) in existence.

?YouTube includes a number of videos (see the various installments of "Khurshid Anwar Raag Mala Interview") of Khwaja Sahib speaking to his countrymen about Ahang-e-Khusravi, with the back of this writer's prematurely balding head appearing as his one-person audience in some of the footage.

"Khwaja Sahib was not alone in working for the survival of this tradition in Pakistan. The late Hayat Ahmad Khan (1921-2005), who founded the All Pakistan Music conference (in which my wife, Shubha Sankaran, and I had the honor to perform a number of times), devoted his life to the cause. Raza Kazim, a prominent Pakistani attorney, founded the Sanjan Nagar Institute of Philosophy and Arts in Lahore, which includes a music division devoted both to the documentation of musical performances and an exploration of the philosophical and aesthetic motives of music.

"But to return to Adam Nayyar. At the time of his death, as noted in obituaries in Dawn and The News, he was Executive Director of the Pakistan National Council on the Arts, and he had previously Director of Lok Virsa, The National Institute for Folk and Traditional Heritage. In his passing, Pakistan has lost a great scholar, and an important cultural emissary."

* * * * * * *

So this is a beginning, albeit initially on a sad note.. As Internet access (and breaks from a very busy schedule allow), I'll be sending further postings from this musical odyssey, from which I hope to find many new friends from Pakistan. Again, I urge you to send your comments and feedback.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Falu's video interview from VOAWorldMusic

Falu, a.k.a. Falguni Shah, was kind enough to give me a television interview last year when she was in Washington as the opening act for the Pakistani supergroup Junoon (see my last posting, which promoed her 1 October concert at Joe's Pub in New York), and at that time my colleague Ravi Khanna (photo at right) produced a fine brief video feature based on my interview, with a short excerpt of "Copper Can", one of her most compelling songs.

Now that I've developed the necessary video editing ability, I'm happy to offer more extended portions of the interview, videotaped by the ever-capable Ilyas Khan of VOA's Urdu Service.

I began the interview by asking Falu who her first music teacher was:



In the course of her answer, after crediting her mother for her initial training, she refers to her next teacher, Ustad Sultan Khan. (The term "ustad", on one level, is roughly equivalent to "maestro" among Muslim musicians, and is used on another level to describe one's honored teacher, equivalent to "guru" among Hindu musicians.) She also appends the honorific "Sahib" after his name, again as a sign of respect. You may notice her touching her ear when she says his name--this, too, is a customary indication of humility when speaking of one's ustad or guru, or of some great musical figure of the past. (The gesture is distantly related to the practice in South Asia of having naughty children cross their arms and pull both ears, sometimes while bouncing up and down as though sitting on their heels, as penance for bad behavior. . . .)

Ustad Sultan Khan is one of the world's leading masters of the sarangi, a fiendishly difficult box fiddle with a skin head, four main strings, and up to 40 sympathetic strings, with a haunting sound and expressiveness close to that of the human voice--which accounts for the fact that it historically has been used to accompany classical vocalists, mimicking almost exactly their improvisations after a split second.

Falu next mentions that she studied singing in the purely classical style with Vandana Katti, a disciple (the customary word for lifetime student) of Kishori Amonkar, one of the greatest vocalists in the Hindustani (Northern South Asian) style of classical music. She represents the Jaipur gharana, or musical/hereditary tradition associated with the princely Indian city of Jaipur. (I'll have more to say on the phenomenon of gharana in a later post.)

Next I asked Falu whether she remembered her first lesson, playful or formal:



Demonstrating how she was taught as a baby being fed by her mother, she sings (very quickly) the seven basic notes of the basic musical scale, or sargam, prevalent in South Asia (the same basic musical system exists in Pakistan and Bangladesh as well, but in common parlance--and hereafter in this blog--the music is generally referred to as "Indian" music.). The word sargam is formed from the first three of the seven basic notes, Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni (Sa), which correspond roughly to the western Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti (Do). Click here for my more detailed description of the Indian sargam.)

She then sings the sargam--in a scale corresponding to the western major scale--shifted up one tone, in a musical process called modulation (key or chord change) in the west, but keeping the same names for the notes, since there is no absolute pitch in Indian music.

Then she changes the scale to that based on another mode or raga, Bhairav, with a flatted second (flat Re/Re) and sixth (flat Dha/La) and the rest of the notes natural. A raga is the format for the basic melodic structure in Indian music; click here for my brief definition of raga.

When I asked her what brought her to the U.S., she replied that while she felt extremely loyal to her classical Indian roots, she was attracted by western music and its various genres: jazz, blues, rock and pop, and the opportunities they offered her for innovation:



Knowing that improvisation is an integral part of Indian classical music, I was curious as to what circumstances led to her writing her first song. Her answer was immediate!



The next logical question was: "What was that first original song?"



Toward the end of her answer, I couldn't suppress a brief off-mike reference to "Both Sides Now", the seminal song by the legendary Joni Mitchell, and she agreed: "Yes, blame the clouds!"

She notes that the song was based on a classical raga, Bairagi Bhairav, a pentatonic (five-tone) raga, with the scale Sa Reb Ma Pa Nib (Sa) (Do Reb Fa Sol Tib (Do)--the "b" indicating the flat interval. In the course of the song, for a brief passage she actually sings the sargam of the scale, with the names of the notes as the words! (If I may be permitted a comment in my capacity of ethnomusicologist: the blending of Indian elements--including the raga--with a western pop sensibility and instrumental idiom in "Hey Baby" is stunningly effective, to the extend that no western listener is likely to hear anything foreign in the song, while at the same time someone familiar with South Asian classical music will most probably recognize immediately, at least subconsciously, the modal structure.)

Finally, I referred to one reviewer's description of her as the happiest singer he had ever heard. Her response:



This is the first of two installments of excerpts from Falu's video interview. The second will follow in a few weeks, focusing on some more details of her development as a performer, and additional discussion of ways in which she has brought her eastern heritage into her music.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Falu to sing (classical) at Joe's Pub in New York

Falu, the professional name for Falguni Shah, the Mumbai-born singer who has made a mark by using her training in Hindustani classical music to bring new dimensions to popular music in the U.S., will be performing a primarily classical music concert at Joe's Pub in New York City on 1 October. Accompanying her will be Mark Tewarson (acoustic guitar), Gaurav Shah (vocal, harmonium, and bansuri [bamboo flute]), Sami Shumays (violin), Borahm Lee (tanpura), Dave Sharma (dholak, daff, and manjira), and Naren Budhkar (tabla). She also has a forthcoming concert at Carnegie Hall on 15 November.

When she was in Washington last year as the opening act for Junoon, the Pakistani supergroup which was performing at the National Geographic auditorium, I was able to interview her about the origins of her interest and career in music. I'll be posting the first video clips from that interview--now that I've learned the basics of video editing--in the near future.

In the meantime, click on this link to see a television feature, based on the interview, written and produced by VOA's senior correspondent Ravi Khanna.

Stay tuned!

Thursday, September 24, 2009

America's living national treasures: A scenesetter

The National Heritage Fellowships, awarded every year by the National Endowment of the Arts, honor a dozen or so practitioners of traditional and folks arts in the United States; this year's disciplines included music, dance, basket weaving, and poetry.

After the 2008 awards ceremony, I wrote in one of my earliest blog entries:

"When I first came to Washington in 1986 to join the Voice of America as the Chief of the Urdu Service (having found the folkloric tradition as one of my avenues of discovery of the communicative powers of music), I attended my first National Heritage Awards celebration in Washington. The splendid narrator for the evening was the late Charles Kurault, host of the incomparable 'Sunday Morning' television show, which more than any other news program before or since quietly but eloquently celebrated the diversity, humanity, and vitality of the American heartland. I remember that evening with crystalline clarity (having moved after 26 years of university study and teaching to broadcast journalism) as carrying a spiritual message that inspired me, in my new and exciting career, to explore culture as a medium of understanding universal values among humankind."

This year's ceremony, to be held again tonight in the visionary Music Center at Strathmore, a cavernous structure that seats an audience of nearly 2,000 amidst a captivating multi-level array of glowing wood surfaces, promises to be no less memorable. Once again, Nick Spitzer, host of the popular Public Radio International "roots [folk/traditional/world] music" program, American Routes, will be the master of ceremonies for the evening.

I hope to comment on aspects of tonight's program in future blog entries, and have already paid tribute in a previous posting to the late Mike Seeger, one of this year's Fellows. To the left is a picture of his widow, Alexa Smith, receiving his award in a ceremony in the national Capitol's visitor's center the day before yesterday (Tuesday, 22 September 2009). You can read more about him, and listen to an audio tribute to him, with photographs, on the NEA Website. (Photo by Tom Pich.)

In the meantime, here are the photographs of other Fellows in the performing arts receiving their awards, with links to their NEA pages, with audio samples:

Here are the Birmingham Sunlights, a gospel music group from the city of that name in the Southern state of Alabama, who specialize in a vocal style, sung a capella (without any instrumental accompaniment) in what is called four-part harmony, with four different melodic lines woven together at different intervals so as to create chords. Go to their NEA Web page for their interview (which you can listen to or read), as well as for audio samples of their distinctive performance style. (Photo by Michael G. Stewart.)

Next among the musical Fellows is Edwin Colón Zayas, possibly the world's leading master of the cuatro, a guitar-like instrument popular in his home, the U.S. Territory of Puerto Rico; the instrument, despite its name (cuatro is "four" in Spanish), has five pairs of strings. You may read his interview (in Spanish, or translated into English), and hear two clips of his music on his NEA Web page. (Photo by Michael G. Stewart.)

Amma D. McKen, from the culturally rich New York borough of Queens, performs in the vocal style of the Orisha religious tradition practiced among the Yoruba tribe of the African nation of Nigeria. Her interview, as well as two audio samples of her performance, is on her NEA Web page. (Photo by Tom Pich.)

Next is Dudley Laufman, a dance caller and musician from Canterbury in the northeastern state of New Hampshire. In the U.S., "barn dances", "square dances", or "contra dance" traditions, movements of the dancers (usually couples, and amateurs, often members of a rural community or group of families), are directed by a "caller" who gives advance notice to the participants of the next dance move, taken from a shared repertoire of stock patterns, that they are to make. Laufman himself is also a fiddle player, and examples of typical dance music, as well as his interview, may be heard on his NEA Web page. (Photo by Tom Pich.)

Finally, among the musicians, Ida Guillory, currently living Daly City, CA, is a singer and master of the accordion. She is known popularly as "Queen Ida", and performs in the Zydeco music and dance tradition, which emerged in the coastal state of Louisiana among the Creole community, whose culture and language resulted from a fascinating fusion of southern American and French influences. She is notable for being the first woman to lead a Zydeco band. Go to her NEA Web page for her interview and music samples. It is also interesting to note that she spent her formative years outside New Orleans, first in Texas, then in California, and yet became one of the best known and most beloved of Zydeco performers. (Photo by Tom Pich.)

This years Fellows also included two dancer/choreographers:

Chitresh Das, originally from India, is a practitioner of the classical Indian dance form known as Kathak, which, like the Flamenco tradition of Spain, or American tap dancing, places a primary emphasis on intricate percussive footwork. He lives and teaches in the San Franciso Bay area. His interview may be read on his NEA Web page. (Photo by Tom Pich.)

Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, now living in Long Beach, CA, is originally from Cambodia, where she and her parents survived the horrific holocaust perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, under which all traditional Cambodian arts, including the rich classical dance legacy, were brutally and ruthlessly suppressed. You may read her interview on her NEA Web page. (Photo by Tom Pich.)

Also see the NEA Website for profiles of the other Fellows--two basket weavers, LeRoy Graber, from Freeman, SD, and Teri Rofkar, a member of the Tinglit tribe from Sitka, AK--and Joel Nelson, a cowboy poet from Alpine, Texas, whose NEA Web page includes audio recordings of him reciting two of his eloquent poems, as well as a slide show of the Cowboy Poetry Festival.

Judging from this rich panorama of diverse talents, tonight's program will most likely be as rich as last year's, and I expect in future postings to highlight the performance, as well as the achievements, of at least two of the National Heritage Fellows, who--in the tradition of some other countries who recognize the importance of the arts and artists--may be considered to be among America's living National Treasures.

(All photos of N.E.A. Chairman Rocco Landesman presenting the awards were provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, and are used with permission; photographer credits are given with each picture. The generous assistance of Elizabeth Stark of the N.E.A.'s Office of Communications is also gratefully acknowledged.)

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

The lure and lore of Andalusia, and a haunting song from the aether of the Internet

Andalusia: A name, a magical concept with a fantasia of historical and cultural resonances. While generally connected with the province of that name in Spain, it also associated with the dominant strain of classical music in North Africa. In my own world, dreams of Andalusia were first awakened during my years as a Flamenco guitarist back in Denver, Colorado, where I was fortunate to serve as one of the two Flamenquistas (the other being the late Vaughan Aandahl) for the large Hispanic community there. So many of the names of songs or genres in our music, or the cities of master performers, came from Andalusia: Seville (Sevillanas), Cádiz, Málaga (Malagueñas), Granada (a beloved piano solo by Isaac Albéniz, 1860-1909). . . .

After numerous visits to India and Pakistan in the 60's, 70's, and 80's, I found that the country I most longed to discover next was Morocco, largely from following the writings of Paul Bowles (1910-1999), that extraordinary American who achieved legendary fame not only as a expatriate writer (The Sheltering Sky, his first novel, being his best-known work, with a subsequent film version directed by Bernardo Bertolucci), but also as composer/musicologist, whose achievements in composition were celebrated at a major three-day festival at Lincoln Center in 1995 (I'll be posting at a later date portions of an interview I did with Bowles at the time), and whose recordings of music from all over Morocco constitute a definitive collection at the Library of Congress. Samples of his readings and music can be heard on a number of CDs available from Amazon.com.

In 1986, during my last months at Duke University, I taught a course in "Music of the Islamic World" for the University's Study Abroad Program (of which I was outgoing Assistant Dean) in the wondrous city of Marrakech. In the midst of my teaching, I took a chance flight to Tangier to meet Bowles (I say chance because he had no telephone, and the best address I had for him was "behind Tangier Socco. . . .") After persistent inquiries here and there in the city, I was able to spend a full afternoon with him talking about music. I'm certain that Bowles' generosity with his time with me grew from the fact that it was not drugs, but our common interest in music that I was pursuing in our conversation, whereas most of his visitors apparently sought to meet him because of his seminal role in 20th Century literature, and his interest in altered states of consciousness. As Norman Mailer wrote, in “Advertisements for Myself”: “Paul Bowles opened the world of Hip. He let in the murder, the drugs . . . the death of the Square . . . the end of civilization" (quoted from a fine biographical sketch of Bowles by Allen Hibbard on www.paulBowles.org, his authorized Website with a veritable treasury of Bowlesiana.

I again visited Morocco in 1994 for a sitar performance at the annual International Cultural Festival (Moussem Culturel) in Asilah with Shubha Sankaran and Ustad Zamir Khan, as well as collaborative experiments with local musicians. Both on this trip, and during the previous visit in 1986, my appreciation of traditional Andalusian music--with its serpentine melodic and narrative development, addicting rhythms, and richness of voices, both human and instrumental, in solo as well as ensemble--grew immeasurably.

So it was yesterday that memories of this wonderful tradition were awakened by yesterday's visit to Washington by my old friend and fellow ethnomusicologist, Philip D. Schuyler, whose areas of expertise include Morocco and its music. Our discussions ranged from contemporary genres, with hip-hop and rap adopted by young Moroccans, back to the living music of the past. Our discussions reminded me of a sublime performance in Washington earlier in the year by the Chabab al-Andalous Rabat Orchestra, with vocal soloists Mohammed Bajeddoub (male) and Bahae Ronda (female).

Happily, the performance has been archived in its entirety (albeit with a small video picture) at the Millennium Stage's extraordinary Website.

Mark Jenkins, the most reliable of world music reviewers in Washington, wrote a beautifully perceptive piece on the performance. (Sadly, Post reviews of world music are now generally relegated to the newspaper's Website under the category "PostRock"!)

As a matter of interest (moving out on a bit of a tangent . . . ), in this era of "new media" and "social networking", it is worth noting the existence of three relevant FaceBook groups: The Andalusian classical music of Morocco (199 members, with a total of 59 links, mostly of quality performance videos, last updated 8 June 2009); Andalusian music - Musique andalouse (275 members, with a total of 35 links, the last relevant posted in January 2009), and Moroccan Andalusian Music (60 members, with three video links, last updated in 2008).

It is indicative of the unique power of music to transcend borders, as well as of the comparatively tolerant ethos of al-Andalus (and of coures, Morocco), that my browsings yielded (on the second site above) a link to one of several videos of L'orchestre Andalou d'Israel, with soloist Emile Zrihan (who is also a cantor), as well as a full-gesture conductor (not traditional), and a full mixed-gender ensemble (again, not customary), with many of the men wearing yarmulkes!

Pursuing this fascinating cultural continuity, I discovered a Web page, including CDs by the above ensemble, dedicated to an Israeli label, Magda Records. The hosting Website, cdRoots.com ("music from the road less traveled . . . "), promises to provide material for future VOAWM musings. As noted under FAQs: "cdRoots is a one-man show, so please be patient. It may take a day or two to respond to your e-mails, and may take three to four days to ship an order (I do take days off, and there is no one else to cover for me!). Please be patient."

More CDs can be found on the Magda Website itself ("Sounds from Another Middle East; Israel's leading Ethnic and World music Label. . . . ")

And yet more distractions: A sub-page (which, sadly, I can no longer locate. . .) connected to the basic "Listen" tab on the cdRoots main Web page, and listing on-line stations of interest.

And the soundstream of the "Listen" tab leads into a haunting song emerging mysteriously from the aether of the Internet, "Guide me O thou great Jehovah" (lyrics on www.cyberhymnal.org!), sung in what sounds like a Scottish brogue against a slow ostinato of just two alternating clustered piano chords, presently joined by a languid drum set background accenting the third beat of four, then moving into a luminous improvisation on the piano of melting jazz harmonies. . . .

The song takes possession of me, and my old compulsion resurfaces: I MUST find out who the artist(s) is(are), WHERE I can find the recording, WHAT inspired the artist(s). (I do find out at last, enough for a listen after I get home, but that must wait for a later post. . . . )

For, again, comes the official end of my day at VOA (the first four hours devoted to learning Final Cut Pro editing skills in order to post original video footage on these pages), and I've not yet gotten down to my original basic purpose when I began this entry: to write a brief but informative review of the Chabab al-Andalous Rabat Orchestra's extraordinary Kennedy Center performance.

At this point, you'll just have to listen for yourself.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Indo-Irish fusions? Delhi to Dublin?

Irish and Indian musicians and dancers collaborating? Is that concept too far a reach?

It didn't seem so to me some months ago when one of my Google searches was spinning predictably out of control, and suddenly I ended up on a YouTube rendition by a group that called itself "Delhi 2 Dublin" that was dancing and playing music on a Montreal stage, demonstrating an energy and joy in performance that was most impressive. I made a mental note to pursue in a blog entry the group's activities at some point in the future.

Well, happily, VOA's Lonnie Shavelson in San Francisco done just that, with a fine radio report.

The group was formed in 2006, and in terms of dance blends Irish step dancing with the super-popular Indian dance form known as bhangra. In terms of the music itself, the vocals are supported by both western instruments (fiddle and guitar) and the South Asian sitar and drums: the two-piece tabla and the barrel-shaped dhol.

You can see 15 different videos of their performances in authorized YouTube links on their Website, by clicking on the "music & downloads" tab directly under their logo at the top of the Web page; audio samples of their music may be found on their MySpace page.

The bhangra craze itself has taken Great Britain (where there are millions of reisdents of South Asian origin) by storm, and is making inroads into American dance culture, particularly on college campuses, where South Asian students from abroad, as well as Americans born of South Asian parents, have become increasingly active in promoting this particular aspect of their traditional culture.

A simple Google search of "Bhangra blowout" brings an impressive 134,000 hits--showing the popularity of the form. The first hit, fortuitously for us, is for the eponymous Website (www.bhangrablowout.com), set up by the students at Washington's George Washington University. We'll be bringing you a report of the next celebration of this dance form by the local student group in the spring of 2010.

Dance away--or at least feast your eyes and ears on this infectious expression of human exuberance!

Friday, September 11, 2009

In search of Alanis Morissette's elusive India: the quest itself

I'm reminded here of the old Saturday morning film serials of my childhood (not those on TV, which we didn't have until I was in junior high school--my father didn't believe in television. . . .)

Cliffhanger: As we left our fearless hero, the ethnomusicologist, at last posting, he said:

"At this point, patient reader, you are almost certainly asking: What happened to Alanis???"

And he urged that you try to find the mystery song from his daughter's Father's Day mix-CD, entitled, as it turns out (as we shall discover below), "Uninvited", somewhere on the Internet:

He directed you to an official pared down (without the elaborate orchestration) video performance of the song on AOL, and numerous YouTube versions of her acoustic rendition of the song on MTV Unplugged, as well as her performance at the 1999 Grammy Awards, in which she received the "Best Rock Song" and "Best Female Rock Vocal Performance" awards for the song, in addition to a nomination for "Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television, or Other Visual Media".

And he urged you: "At this point I would ask YOU to characterize the performance, and identify what you find unusual in the presentation." And he hoped that some of you would respond . . . .

For the preceding background to this question--regarding the Beatles, sitars, ragas, tablas, and such matters--click here.

I'll confess that in concluding the previous post, I was dodging an analysis, partly because the first few times I heard the song the musical innovations did not strike me explicitly, and it remained for my surbahar-playing wife and fellow practitioner of Indian music Shubha to point out to me that there was indeed something quite unique in the song. I think it's important to experience the music intuitively first, and then analyze what exceptional musical characteristics contribute to that experience.

But I'll also confess that my taxonomic obsession (previously chronicled in "Who was that masked . . . musician, anyway?") stymied me in my initial explorations of the origins of the song. First of all, the version on my daughter's mix-CD had no title. Which meant that I was already handicapped in looking for the song in the VOA music library. For some reason or other I was convinced--probably because of stylistic features--that it was on her initial CD, Jagged Little Pill, (turns out that it was, after all, recorded shortly shortly after JLP) and I spent a good half hour trying, to no avail, to locate it on the copy I checked out from the library. Which drove me crazy.

Then, on sudden inspiration (this is, after all, 2009), and taking advantage of the panoply of reference options on the Web, after listening to the first few lines of the song on the mix-CD, I do a Google search for one of the exact phrases of the song, and after bouncing from one Website to another, I finally discover that the song was titled "Uninvited", and was initially not released as a single, but rather was from the soundtrack of the 1998 film City of Angels, and was not included on one of her own CD's until the 2005 Collection.

Fine. Now I can place the song in the chronology and discography of Morissette's work. But then of course I have to embark on an additional search of the Web for clues to the origins of what seems to me to be almost certainly an overall Indian mood--and the ethnomusicologist in me will not rest until I know just how the wonderful effects of that song came to be!

Well, after another half hour of ricocheting from Website to Website, I did learn that after the staggering success of Jagged Little Pill (according to Billboard Magazine, it is the 12th best-selling album in the world, at 32,200,00, and the best-selling album ever by a woman artist), Alanis Morissette went to India for six weeks in 1997--thirty years after the Beatles. I cannot resist here steering you to a Macleans' Magazine article, quoted online in the Canadian Encyclopedia, regarding the circumstances of her trip:

"Imagine. You are 23 years old and you have made the biggest-selling album ever recorded by a female singer. You have won four Grammys and six Junos [the Canadian equivalent of the Grammy Awards]. You have toured the world, and everywhere you go, from Milwaukee to Manila, you can hear echoes of your own voice raging from car radios. You are a lapsed Roman Catholic, an Ottawa girl who learned to bare her soul in Los Angeles, and who became, as you put it, Miss Thing. Now everyone wants a piece of you but you desperately want to get away. And get real. Who you gonna call? Mother Teresa?

"Well, if you're Alanis Morissette, that's exactly what you do. . . . ."

Dear reader, you'll have to read the online article in full to learn the extraordinary circumstances surrounding that call, and the eerie consequences.

But for my purposes, I could find no online references whatsoever to the relationship of "Uninvited" to her trip to India. Was it written before, during, or after the trip? Did she meet any Indian musicians? Did she hear any concerts? Not a clue. Nothing.

Which leaves me with the only option being to pursue a telephone interview with Alanis Morissette. But I am unable to find any direct link to her management to begin such a pursuit.

A Google search for Alanis' label, Maverick Records, brings up as the first entry www.maverick.com, with the only constant piece of information being the phrase "Maverick: An Entertainment Company"-- Maverick Records' parent company, and which otherewise consists solely of what seems to be a simulated television screen with a briefly flickering and then distorted Maverick logo, then the phrase "coming soon",--accompanied by a hideous white noise hissing underneath an almost radioactive black-pixeled television "snow" seething infinitesimally within a calm, tweed-like blackish fabric border.

The telephone line of her record label, Maverick Records (which Wikipedia identifies as being in Burbank California), is out of order when I call; the supervising operator of Directory Assistance, who initially gave me the number, himself confirms this.

I go to http://maverickrecordscontact.com/, having found in Google search (#3) the following entry: "Contact Maverick Records - Contact information: Contact info and address to Maverick Records and all other important record labels. Submit your demos!" I am forwarded to http://www.hitquarters.com, and click through a series of pages, only to be told "It's time to sign up! It's free, takes less than a minute and will definitely enhance your music career."

Now comes the bottom line: I'm given the option of selecting "1 ad-supported Artist Page ($0) - Free! (Does not include full access to HitQuarters)". Which presumably means no access to Alanis Moriessette's management. Otherwise it's $15. Or $25.

But I don't want to submit my demo. I want to contact Maverick Records! I want to talk to Alanis Morissette! To learn how and why she wrote "Uninvited!!

(. . . . .)

Well. I's the end of the day. The end of the week. The work week, at least. On Monday perhaps I'll try other avenues to contact the management.

Unless I send a personal e-mail tonight to Alanis on her official Website. With a link to this blog. With a request for a telephone interview.

Maybe I'll do that.

But in any case, the unfolding mystery of the origions of this wonderful song, this astonishing two-Grammy-Award-Winning masterpiece, will continue in a later installment, hopefully with some direct elucidation from Alanis Morissette herself.

In the meantime, I'll go home and watch City of Angels on the instant "play now" option of my Netflix.

I've established that at least that is possible tonight.

Happy Friday!

In search of Alanis Morissette's elusive India: the background

In an earlier posting on personal tape and CD song compilations, I referred to a wonderful song by Alanis Morissette which, as my wife, Shubha Sankaran, observed, had a number of rather startling musical elements not typically found in western pop music, but very characteristic of Indian music. But before addressing that particular song in detail, a bit of a retrospective is appropriate.