Calling Dylan ........

Well you know, if people are going to keep dropping in on me from space and telling me I am foolish / selfish / lazy / whatever to have given up writing, I suspect I shall have to offer a note of explanation. The fact of the matter is, I have made up my mind to not write if I have nothing to say. My daily experiences are purely empirical evidence; they need to be analysed in perspective before I can hope to make them useful to a reader, right?

I have been thinking about the Hindi Jazz idea for quite a while now; those of you at the Saarang OAT LM thingummy will know that I am trying to channel my composition and guitar work in the same direction. However, this would not have been written unless I wasn't required, (at 12 hours' notice, the sluggard!) to write this as a Humanities assignment for my good friend Condom. Nevertheless, I really believe this is an idea whose time has now come; you, gentle reader, are welcome to prove it either way.

Once upon a time, Einstein was pressed into making an after-dinner speech. He rose dutifully when he was called upon to do the honors and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry. I have nothing to say." His host was horrified at his faux pax; Einstein assured him that he would amend matters one day. An year later, his erstwhile host got a telegram from Einstein, "Now I have something to say". He instantly threw a dinner party and Einstein delivered his after-dinner speech.

To quote the great man himself, "Now I have something to say"

Be well, all.

An anomaly in Indian musicology

Introduction

The theory and history of North Indian classical music has been the subject of copious documentation as part of its own tradition by virtue of its hereditary nature. With its assimilation into the hippie culture of the US in the 60s, it has been studied comprehensively by Western scholars as well.

With ‘raga’ rock becoming a sonic symbol of the 60s counterculture, it was only a matter of time before Indian masters would acquire fame for their ‘exotic’ scales and instruments among Western audiences. Unfortunately, this has led to a perception of Indian music as being mysterious and ‘exotic’. As evidence for the foregoing, one need only remember that the concept of ‘fusion’ instantly evokes images of sophistication and musical depth.

Fusion, as a blending of genres, has always been extant in the history of music. The exaltation of Indian classical music as an alien art form; aided and abetted by Indian musicians seeking to capitalize on this niche demand has caused us to lose sight of the evolution of Indian folk music and its integration into popular culture. In this essay, we document the phenomenon of ‘proto-fusion’, the genre that identifies what is popularly perceived as the Golden Age of Indian film music.

Studying pop music

As a rule of thumb, the study of different genres of music is fundamentally based on an analysis of the predominant scales used in its compositions. It is a generally held Western belief that the basis of classical music is the diatonic scale. However, crucially, it is now known that the diatonic scale has never played a role in Asian music. Any study of Asian music has to be arrived at through an analysis of the pentatonic scale.

It should come as no surprise then that the first Western musicians to take an interest in Indian music were pentatonic-based players, who found the tones of Indian music to resemble those of their own native and derived cultures – British blues-rock musicians.

Blues may, with some justification, be considered the universal language of world music. By incorporating the concept of tritone-shifted impure notes into the pentatonic scale, blues opened the doors for folk music to interact with classical concepts to form the vast creative musical universe of jazz.

The universal appeal of blues, it is posited here, bears a direct relation to the spread of Islam. Historically, the only musical culture to use tritones on a regular basis is the Arabic culture. With the Islamic conquest of Africa by the middle of the 11^th century, blues music developed over a period of 500 years as the African diatonic scale interacted with the conquering pentatonic culture in an antagonistic manner to create a chaotic, noisy and extremely emotive genre of music.

The Golden Age of Indian music

History

It is this music that found its way across the Atlantic on the lips and banjos of slaves in the American South. And so, with the emergence of jazz in the first few decades of the 20^th century, when Indian music finally found a stage for itself, following independence and the burgeoning of the film industry, it was to this culture that it looked for inspiration.

A Famous Example

If there is one musical phrase that summarizes the disregarded influences on Indian film music, it is the bebop tune, “My name is Anthony Gonsalves”. The music director, Laxmikant Pyarelal, in one of the many subliminal messages that litter the cinema of this era, pays tribute to his violin master – a Goanese named Anthony Gonsalves. Gonsalves is representative of the many Catholic musical preceptors who imbued the film music of the era with a distinctly Latin feel by drawing on their Goanese Portuguese musical roots.

Musical features

As Naresh Fernandes recounts, “By invoking the name of his violin teacher in that tune in Amar Akbar Anthony, the composer Pyarelal had finally validated the lives of scores of Goan Catholic musicians whose working years had been illuminated by the flicker of images dancing across white screens in airless sound studios, even as acknowledgement of their talent whizzed by in the flash of small-type credit titles.

The arc of their stories – determined by the intersection of passion and pragmatism, of empire and exigency – originated in church-run schools in Portuguese Goa and darted through royal courts in Rajasthan, jazz clubs in Calcutta and army cantonments in Muree. Those lines eventually converged on Bombay’s film studios, where the Goan Catholic arrangers worked with Hindu music composers and Muslim lyricists in an era of intense creativity that would soon come to be recognized as the golden age of Hindi film song.”

The decline

Intrinsic Causes

The Indian film industry (the music industry being a subset thereof) carried the seeds for its eventual decline into mediocrity within itself. The primary reason for this was the societal disapproval of the musical profession in India, as a result of orthodox Hindu and Muslim beliefs. As a result, Indian musicians never acquired the iconic notoriety that played such an important role in sustaining the creativity of American music past the swinging 60s.

Also the Goan involvement in music was also not heavily publicized before 1962 in consequence of the Indian insecurity vis-à-vis Portuguese occupation. As a result, the Goan innovators in the 1940-60 Indian film industry have remained unsung. By the law of diminishing returns, the Goan musicians, circa 1955, decided to subdue their distinctive style in order to survive in the competitive Bombay market.

Circumstantial Reasons

However, the precipitating factor in the emasculation of Indian film music was quite simply the expansion in its size. With a limited core of musicians and burgeoning studio demand, composers’ standards deteriorated; and with societal stigma preventing the rise of innovative successors, film music, save some honorable coruscations of creativity, had lapsed into tedium by the middle of the 70s.

In addition, the Western world in 1975 had entered the Golden Age of British Heavy metal; bands such as Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath had taken the next step in musical evolution by using volume and distortion as a canvas for expressing the nihilistic aggression of the post-Beat generation.

Whereas music in the US had acquired a substantial countercultural market allowing it to experiment and innovate unaffected by market forces; Indian musicians, restricted in their options by the economic crises of 70s India, had to toe the mainstream line. As a result, three successive generations of indigenous musical innovation were lost to creating unimaginative pop music.

The current scene

The current generation marks a turning point in terms of the musical evolution of our culture, and hence, it is crucial for us to understand its musical proclivities in terms of the perspective we have acquired from the foregoing.

All over the country, particularly in the metropolitan cities, small communities of adherents to the Western classic and metal rock counterculture are making their presence felt. These young, upper middle-class Indians, disenchanted with the puerile fare served up to them in their childhood; or influenced by the rare survivors of the commercial era, have taken to the Western cultural ethos with such conviction that it is almost impossible to view them in terms of their natural culture. Their music, their lyrics and their collective attitude is governed by the perceptions of the Western world – the Western world of 20 years ago, to boot.

Now, it is evident that, should such a scenario continue to exist, Indian folk music would be condemned to an unsung extinction in the near future. When the market dictates terms to mainstream music and a foreign culture to the alternative sections, indigenous music is left without too many possible practitioners.

Reasons for optimism

However, there is sufficient reason to believe that, with increasing awareness of our indigenous folk music traditions, change is imminent. A small but growing number of New Age Indian musicians have risen above the dogmas of both economics and iconoclasm to create music natural to their psyche and culture.

Neo-fusion, if we may term it that, is characterized by an eclectic set of musical idioms that are beginning to gain credence in both the film and alternative music industry. While this is partly (and almost comically) a consequence of the counterculture attempting to imitate the West’s appropriation of Indian culture, there are genuine efforts underway to integrate Indian folk themes into music that is technically proficient enough to command respect from the counterculture.

Sufi pioneer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, vocalist Shankar Mahadevan and percussionist Trilok Gurtu were among the first of this breed of Indian musicians. The bands Euphoria, Indian Ocean and Junoon are contemporary examples in this regard. Since the turn of the century, Indian audiences are turning increasingly appreciative of music that they can appreciate both viscerally and intellectually, a phenomenon that seems to bear a strong correlation to the rise of the “India Shining” paradigm.

Suggestions

This new brand of music, while a commendable effort at promoting indigenous music, appears to have digressed somewhat into a commercial direction. With the film industry still borrowing liberally from the Western idioms of heavy percussive backgrounds and power chords, this new generation is also finding its experimentation confined within the realm of the commercially exploitable.

The only possible solution to this over-professionalism and artificiality that permeates our music culture is to understand the story of the three lost generations of Indian music, and begin to compensate for it by patronizing the most recent authentic brand of Indian music at the grass roots level.

We need musicians who can play music from the 60s film genre with the technical proficiency that would inspire young adherents of the Western rock counterculture to seek out the truth about their own colorful musical heritage instead of being disillusioned into blind imitation of foreign countercultures.

The Golden Age of Indian music is lost in the discussion of the combine between Indian classical music and avant jazz; and the plaudits that Indian virtuosos now habitually earn at international performances. It is extremely convenient to perceive music as a performing art and forget that, in its essence, it is a source of ego-less happiness and not adrenalin-pumped self-esteem.

The musician owes a responsibility to society – the responsibility to articulate its deep-seated hopes and fears; the responsibility to be a voice that speaks of things they cannot express; the responsibility to be a window through which an audience can experience familiar emotions in varyingly new perspectives.

It is incumbent upon members of the counterculture – in their roles as performers and members of the audience – to distinguish the Western culture of virtuosic exhibitionism and dexterous perfectionism from the Eastern penchant for rhythmic percussion and melodic improvisation; shed their insecurity regarding embracing their indigenous culture and encourage the resurgence of authentic India folk music – music that describes the Indian culture of today.

Or, in colloquial terms, we need a Dylan or two.