Bhatiali Song : The Song of the Boatman - Page 5

Posted: 17 years ago
Originally posted by punjini



Hi Anol. Thanks, this is great. Who played the tabla in this?
 


Tabla : Ustad Shafaat
It's from : Golden Raaga Collection - Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia


Posted: 17 years ago
Originally posted by Qwest


punjini Ji,

The Tabla was played by Zakir Hussain if you are using real player it also mentioned Zakir ji name with album information.

Chaurasia's duets with tabla player Zakir Hussain are stunning displays of skill on each musician's part

album: Golden Raaga Collection - 



Dada - you can get the info here : http://musicstore.real.com/music_store/album?albumid=1271203 &artistid=812842
and here :

Golden Raaga Collection - Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia      
Tabla : Ustad Shafaat Amhed Khan



Now I got it - where the confusion is arising from - in Real Player (I use iTunes normaly) it's showing as album info -  "An unequaled master of the bansuri, or bamboo flute, Chaurasia has made the flute an acceptable in Indian classical music. Chaurasia's duets with tabla player Zakir Hussain are stunning displays of skill on each musician's part."

"Real" messed up! πŸ˜†

Edited by soulsoup - 17 years ago
Posted: 17 years ago
wow thx for the info barnali di and qwestda πŸ˜› very nice to know more about one more kind of music πŸ˜ƒ
Posted: 17 years ago
Originally posted by soulsoup




Dada - you can get the info here : http://musicstore.real.com/music_store/album?albumid=1271203 &artistid=812842
and here :

Golden Raaga Collection - Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia      
Tabla : Ustad Shafaat Amhed Khan



Now I got it - where the confusion is arising from - in Real Player (I use iTunes normaly) it's showing as album info -  "An unequaled master of the bansuri, or bamboo flute, Chaurasia has made the flute an acceptable in Indian classical music. Chaurasia's duets with tabla player Zakir Hussain are stunning displays of skill on each musician's part."

"Real" messed up! πŸ˜†

Thanks Anol Da for clearing up the confusion that what I got when I asked for  the Album info from real player. Edited by Qwest - 17 years ago
Posted: 17 years ago

Bangla Urban Folk Songs


Exploration of the Bangla urban folk/rock/pop music in contemporary Calcutta.
Avishek Ganguly

In the backdrop of a globalized late-modernity, the post-independence, contemporary metropolis in India has emerged as a site of prolific cultural production. And my project on the recent upsurge of Urban Music in Calcutta is an attempt to trace one such medium of the cultural expression of the contemporary metropolitan.

The short but illustrious history of Bangla urban music, can be thought to have begun with the songs sung by mistresses (Baijis) to entertain their feudal lords (Babus) in early nineteenth century Calcutta. However, it reached its first formal articulation in the hands of Ramnidhi Gupta -Nidhubabur Toppa (Nidhubabu's Toppa) - romantic lyrical compositions set to lighter variations of Hindustani Classical tunes - which, to this day, retains one of the strongest associations with Purono Kolkatar Gaan (The songs of old Calcutta). Bangla urban music was further enriched by numerous songs from the Bengali stage and also thrived in the many minor genres like Baithaki or Kabigaan sung mainly on festive occasions, till the later half of the nineteenth century, which saw the rise of musical geniuses like Rabindranath Thakur and Dwijendralal Ray. While Rabindranath left us the vibrant legacy of Rabindrasangeet, Ray has been best remembered for his patriotic compositions, but both of them pioneered the use of western musical styles along side folk elements in Bangla songs. The 1930s saw the beginning of the long tradition of Bangla Adhunik Gaan (Bangla Modern Songs), which continued more or less uninterrupted (a notable exception being the Ganasangeet/Public Songs genre pioneered by Salil Chowdhury in the 1950s) well into the seventies and eighties, till the contemporary urban music of Calcutta in the nineties emerged as a radical intervention. As a part of my project with Sarai, I am trying to chart out the trajectory of this latest musical intervention in the everyday life of Calcutta and attempting to read them variously as a subculture, a counterculture or may be a part of the dominant itself that is trying to negotiate a local, often resistive, cultural production in the age of late-capitalist globalisation.

The first successful articulation of a globalized late-modernity in Bangla urban songs can be traced back to 1977, when a band called Moheener Ghoraguli [Moheen's Horses] (naming themselves in an allusion to the prominent Bangla modernist poet Jibanananda Das) brought out their first record - Sangbigna Pakhikul o Kolkata Bishayak [Ruffled Feathers and Of Kolkata]. Within the short span of five years (1976-1981) that they were around, the bands' repertoire went on to include three records and a dozen odd public performances before it died a premature death. Subsequent efforts in this direction by small time bands like Nogor Philomel [Philomel in the City](1984) and Nagorik (note the unmistakable urban ring in their names, nogor being the Bangla word for city) or solo performers like Ranjan Prasad (1978), also failed to endear audiences still reluctant to yield any space to radical experiments in the mainstream corpus of Bangla Adhunik Gaan. An uneasy silence of muffled sounds characterised the interim decade, as Calcutta and Bengal, struggled to come to terms with the unsettling legacy of the Naxalite movement, till, in the early nineties, Suman Chattopadhyay started or rather revived the trend of experimental Bangla modern songs. While the success of Suman's experiments emboldened veterans like Pratul Mukhopadhyay and Ranjan Prasad to take up their guitars once again, it also set the stage for a host of new performers: bands like Poroshpathor, Chondrobindoo, Cactus, Abhilasha, Bhoomi and soloists like Anjan Dutta and Nachiketa. Such was the renewed interest in experimental music that the long disbanded Moheener Ghoraguli got their acts together again and released an edited compilation of their songs at the Calcutta Book Fair in 1995, apply titled Aabar Bochor Kuri Pore [Again, After Twenty Odd Years].

Here, an introductory word needs to be said about the tradition of 'English' (in the sense of non-Indian) urban music of Calcutta as well, since I will - even if in a less detailed manner - discuss it as part of my ongoing project. Western music in the form of jazz, blues, rock and roll and rock had been seeping unnoticed into the Calcutta musical underground over the last 60 odd years. Beginning with the Western and Anglo-Indian musicians who played at the elite clubs and the Park Street restaurants in the evening (a home-grown Moulin Rouge milieu as Bengalis loved to think!) and coming up to the first English bands in the seventies, it is therefore not unnatural that English urban music has also evolved into a cultural expression of the city which had once been the Second City of the British Empire! At around the same time that Moheener Ghoraguli were experimenting with Bangla music, bands like New Blues Connection, Shiva and Air Wave were trying to reach out to a slightly different segment of the Calcutta audience. And the kind of music that they generally, faithfully played (and which also holds true for most other bands in the city even now) comprised of covers of well-known American or British musicians or bands.

Edited by Qwest - 17 years ago
Posted: 17 years ago

Research Methodology
Avishek Ganguly


Apart from reading up whatever little literature is available on the subject, or rather partly because of the paucity of such readily available resources, I decided to adopt the field survey method for executing my project. It consisted of primarily talking to the practising urban musicians and some of the regular observers and commentators on the musical scene in Calcutta, attending a few of their live playing sessions and of course listening extensively to all their tapes and recordings that were available in the market.

I have conducted two such field surveys in Calcutta. On my first trip in December-January 2001-02, I started off with Moheener Ghoraguli. The greatest handicap in working on Moheener Ghoraguli was unfortunately the fact of its bandleader and most well-known member Gautam Chattopadhyay's untimely death just before I began my research. Gautam da or Moni da, as he was fondly known to most of his admirers and fellow musicians, had left a decent job with Exide Corporation in Bhopal to come back to Calcutta and immerse himself full time into music making. A versatile musician with mastery over the guitar and the ektara alike, it was primarily his vision and conviction that led to the formation of Moheener Ghoraguli in the late seventies. Most of his legacy in the form of scattered writings, reviews, recordings and experiences are now being preserved by his wife Minati Chattopadhay with whom I spent long hours trying to get a grasp over both the facts and feelings that gone into the making of the man and his music. (The fact she, and Gautam da when he was alive, were close friends of my girlfriend's mother of course helped me a lot in gaining access to archival material that would, otherwise have probably been out of bounds for the ordinary researcher). She made available to me interesting trivia like the advertisements and even the tickets of Moheen's first concert for example, designed by the band members themselves announcing their arrival on the Bengali music scene. And from the whole disorganised heap of dusty pamphlets, stray, moth-eaten lyrics and old records I could finally assemble a semblance of an authentic musical biography of the band.

The original members - ghoras (horses) as they referred to themselves - are now scattered all over the world, the few who still live in Calcutta recount in a halting manner, a sepia-tinted tale of those magical times. Incidentally even their first couple of records, being those small archaic 33 rpm discs are also hard to trace now, and though I have been able to track down a couple of them I am yet to find a suitable turntable to play them and record them instead on tape which could then me stored in the archives of Sarai for posterity. Though I have collected all the albums brought out by the new, re-grouped band in the nineties, unfortunately, I have memories of attending only one live concert by Gautam da. But I did attend one of the numerous memorial concerts held after his death and one can also easily get to hear some of their old numbers being played by the contemporary bands. To compensate for my loss I also talked to some of the die-hard fans who had attended most of Moheen's concerts during their heydays to get the feel of what they had been like. And from what I have recorded one can easily figure out how Moheener Ghoraghuli, with their on stage histrionics and spontaneous harmonisation, had completely redefined the art of Bangla musical performances. A wealth of information on Moheener Ghoraguli was also provided by Abhijit Adhikari, who had grown up in close proximity with Gautam da and his band and which enabled him to write regular columns on their music and similar such experiments in some of the Calcutta newspapers in the last 15 odd years. An amateur commentator, propelled mostly by his love for this music, Adhikari himself has been experimenting with small time bands and was generous enough to make available to me whatever he had preserved of his writings over the years.

Unfortunately, though perhaps not surprisingly, Gautam da and Moheener Ghoraguli did not receive sufficient critical attention in their hey days which have undoubted made my task a lot more difficult. However, their post mortem fame and fetishisation nevertheless enabled an exciting research experience complete with the sighs and that lost glint in the eyes of the old ghoras, a nostalgic journey down the shady alleys rather than the bright thoroughfares of popular urban music in Calcutta.

During the course of my fieldwork I also met Ranjan Prasad, one of the early solo, performers of Bangla urban music. Prasad, now a chief engineer with the PWD, had been inspired both by the likes of Hemango Biswas, a master of the Ganasangeet genre in the fifties and sixties and the Beatles and the Bob Dylans, to take up his guitar and put his own lyrics to tune. A contemporary of Moheener Ghoraguli, Prasad was one of the first performers to call his brand of music 'urban folk'. Like most of his contemporaries he also did not receive much attention when it would have probably mattered most but is nevertheless happy to see the recognition, albeit belated, that urban popular music has been getting of late. Talking to him about his music one still can't miss the occasional spark in his middle-aged eyes at the mention of "Give peace a chance"!

An interesting insight into the cultural positioning of these bands and performers (mostly the younger ones) was revealed to me on this trip. It was a little difficult for me to track down most of the bands during their 'busy' year-ending schedule, as most of them were preoccupied with the likes of New Year's Eve concerts of which I attended a few. And from the venues where they performed - ranging from five star hotels to posh, elitist clubs in Calcutta - I could gather that band music was not only 'in' on campuses (that's where I got to hear them for the first time) but was slowly being appropriated into the mainstream of high culture itself. I observed a new development on this on my second trip last month: some of these band songs and their remixes are now gradually becoming popular as foot tapping numbers in the discothques and night clubs of the city as well!

On my second trip to Calcutta in April 2002, I again got to meet most of the popular, established and upcoming bands in the circuit and this time I spent long hours interviewing some of the band members themselves. This time I had also prepared a questionnaire for the musicians which required them to fill up detailed enquiries grouped together under the following broad headings:

1.Personal Background and Early Influences
2. Becoming a Musician and the Profession of Bangla/Western Urban Music in Calcutta
3. The Practice of Urban Music
4.The Audience, Reception and Circulation of Urban Music
5.Aesthetic Questions

While some of the musicians were daunted by the prospect of having to write answers to nearly 50 odd questions, all of them were ready to talk at length about the questions that I had posed, which I then recorded on a micro-cassette recorder.

An interesting addition on this trip was the long interview I conducted with Amit Dutta (again, fondly Amit da…in fact this notion of an extended fraternity among both the musicians and their audiences has been a hall mark of the sociability around this variety of urban music and that is interesting if one thinks that not many among the audience or even fellow musicians, would have casually referred to a Hemanta Mukherjee or a Manna De as Hemanta da or Manna da!). Amit da, now in his early forties, has been learning and playing the guitar for nearly 30 years and is easily the most famous and respected guitar tutor in the city given that most of the contemporary Bangla band performers have been his students at some point of time. A regular at Some Place Else, the jazz bar at the five star Park Hotel (where I've listened to him twice), Amit da along with his equally talented brother Kochu, has been a part of the popular Western music scene in Calcutta for most of their living years. Descendants of Raichand Boral, the celebrated Bengali singer of the early 20th century, they have jointly and individually been a part of nearly a half a dozen bands and have an interesting story to tell, especially about the development of western music in the city.

The other bands/performers whom I interviewed were Poroshpathor (Touchstone) and Chondrobindu (the last, nasal sounding letter of the Bangla alphabet) two of the most popular Bangla bands in the city, and Bhoomi (Earth), a relatively new entrant which has become a favourite with the city audiences in the last 2 years. Among the solo performers, I did a long interview with Anjan Dutta, a noted actor on the Bengali stage and parallel films, who was self confessedly inspired to sing by the hugely successful Suman Chattopadhay who inaugurated the second wave of Bangla urban music in the early nineties.

One of the first few Bangla bands of the second wave of urban music in Calcutta, Poroshpathor has been around for nearly a decade now. I have attended their concerts in places as varied as the Jadavpur University campus in Calcutta and 'cultural nites' in small towns, and have also listened to all three of their albums available on tape. This time round, I spoke at length with Ayan (here again, the first name references to these singers help to foster an intimacy with the audience, mostly among college crowds) - a founder member and lead vocalist of the band, sitting, incidentally, on the 'lobby' adjacent to the Arts Faculty Building at Jadavpur University. Ayan spoke about the history of his own and the bands' music making, their influences and more importantly, their differences with the mainstream tradition of Bangla Adhunik Gaan (Bengali Modern Songs), and the different audience reception that they have noticed in the metropolis and the small town. With the copyrights on Rabindrasangeet being recently withdrawn, he also revealed a few of the interesting experiments that his band is planning to carry out with these songs - so far, the holy cow of Bangla music.

The only self professed 'deconstructionist' music band Chondrobindoo, taking their name from the last letter of the Bangla alphabet that produces a nasal intonation, has been one of the most successful Bangla bands in the circuit. They have been around from the mid-nineties and have come up following the usual route via college campuses. The uniqueness of Chondrobindoo lies in their lyrics that mostly appear to be nonsense rhymes but on a closer hearing reveal the subtle political comments disguised in lighthearted parody and sarcasm. This has been a defining characteristic of all four of their albums, the albums themselves having strange titles like Gadhaa (An Ass) or simply 'Cho' (from the first letter of their name, which is also the 6th letter of the Bangla alphabet). I spoke at length to Anindo and Upal, the two lead vocalists and founder members of the band and they held forth on their brand of music, the absurdity of their lyrics and the contemporary Bangla urban music scenario.

A relatively new entrant, Bhoomi [Earth] has fast emerged to be one of the more popular bands in the last couple of years. It is the only band which defines its music as decidedly 'urban folk', and it is evident in their consistent fusion of modern, urban lyrics with Bangla rural folk tunes like Baul or Bhatiyali, the latter being traditionally sung by the boatmen on the Ganga and also the Padma, now in Bangladesh. I spoke to Surojit, the lead vocalist of the band, about their kind of music and characteristics of the unique sound that audiences have now come to associate with Bhoomi. Surojit mentioned an important achievement in this regard when he correctly pointed out that it was Bhoomi of all the bands, which has been successful in expanding the audience of Bangla urban music beyond the college campus and youth circuits into the older, middle aged listeners. Though everyday city life remains one of their main inspirations behind their music, he interestingly stated that there was no conscious attempt to sound political at all.

Anjan Dutta was the only solo performer of Bangla urban music that I spoke to on this trip and I caught up with him at the studio where he was busy editing a new television serial. Anjan is a familiar name in Calcutta and Bengal on account of his prolonged stint in the Bengali group theatre circuit and also in parallel films, where he has worked with directors like Buddhadev Dasgupta, Mrinal Sen and Aparna Sen. A self taught guitarist, he said that it was Suman Chattopadhyay's songs in the early nineties that first inspired him to sing. He has subsequently released 4 albums and performed in many live concerts in and out of Calcutta. A public intellectual in his own right, Anjan however, pointed out some disturbing trends in the contemporary Bangla urban music movement. He was alarmed at the increasing lack of political and social awareness in some of these songs, their sluggish reaction to the ill effects of American globalisation and in the end a steady de-radicalisation of this music, which had so far survived as a subculture but is increasingly becoming a part of 'the system'.

The distillation of all the interviews, questionnaires, literature, live concerts and albums that I have been working through for this project are yet to be organised into a coherent format for a formal, full-length presentation. I can however, trace some trends emerging from the data that I have already collected. Ideally, I would like to spend some more time on this and try and collect all available data - both musical and non-musical - on this cultural phenomenon of the city of Calcutta so that it facilitates a comprehensive archival collection at Sarai for all future references

Edited by Qwest - 17 years ago
Posted: 17 years ago

 

Edited by Qwest - 17 years ago
Posted: 17 years ago
Thanks Qwestji for sharing. As you have mentioned Bhatiali is sad songs, I would like to add here that normally boatman used to sail for couple of months, year or sometimes more than a year, leaving behind their newly wedded wife, family, children. They even didn't know they would be able to come back. So their emotions always reflected in their songs.

Thanks Anolji for uploading Bhatiali of Pt.H.Chourasia. Enjoying very much.
Posted: 17 years ago

Originally posted by Bonie


Thanks Qwestji for sharing. As you have mentioned Bhatiali is sad songs, I would like to add here that normally boatman used to sail for couple of months, year or sometimes more than a year, leaving behind their newly wedded wife, family, children. They even didn't know they would be able to come back. So their emotions always reflected in their songs.

Thanks Anolji for uploading Bhatiali of Pt.H.Chourasia. Enjoying very much.
BonieDi,

All credit goes to Barnali Didi, She is the one comes up with such a great threads and Anol Da addition is Tulana-hoina.

Posted: 17 years ago
Originally posted by Qwest


All credit goes to Barnali Didi, She is the one comes up with such a great threads and Anol Da addition is Tulana-hoina.

Dada, credit goes to you too. We are the fortunate ones, who get to learn so much , what otherwise would have remained unknown. I am amazed at the information you all have. Didi I know was/is so busy lately but still she manages to find time and upload  here and in the Satyajit Ray thread.Anolda's upload of the HChaurasiaji's recital is just too good and your articles... food for a hungry soul... you all rock !!!

I like the bhatiali songs..for the feel of the songs..they sound so in sync with nature, carefree, mystic and so rich..it feels as though it moves with the flow of the waves in the water...

Edited by adi_0112 - 17 years ago

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