Traditions sustained through centuries and hybrids hooked to the latest novelty are found side by side in music from India. Schools of classical improvisation are still being handed down from parent to child. Meanwhile, pop composers come up with nutty pastiches of ancient and current styles. And somewhere in between, classical musicians and electronica producers collaborate on new settings for old melodies and messages.
Although ragas for Indian sitar have been amply documented on recordings, music for the sitar’s larger, lower-voiced, less flashy relative, the surbahar, is much rarer. Ashok Pathak comes from a family devoted to dhrupad, a meditative style of playing that lingers over the slow prelude of the raga, the alap. On “Ancient Court Raga Traditions: The Pathak Gharana; Dhrupad Ragas on Surbahar” (World Arbiter), Mr. Pathak plays two ragas accompanied only by the drone of two tambouras. Although he eventually gets around to rhythmically stating the raga melodies, the bulk of each performance is the alap, which seemingly pulls expansive tendrils of melody out of nowhere.
The movie “Monsoon Wedding” may have introduced some audiences to the excesses of Bombay (or Bollywood) musicals, but Western disc jockeys and other hipsters have long been fond of the genre-scrambling pop songs, called filmi, that set loose the song-and-dance fantasies. “The Rough Guide to Bollywood” (World Music Network) starts with a Hari Krishna chant set to a wah-wah funk guitar and lingers primarily in the 1970’s with Bollywood twists on spy-movie crescendos, cha-cha and disco as well as Indian classical and folk melodies. “Mondo India” (Ark 21) concentrates on another film composer, A. R. Rahman, whose musical blends are smoother and more serene, surrounding graceful Indian vocals and percussion in stately electronics.
Electronica producers and Indian classical improvisers both work with long stretches of time; perhaps it was inevitable that they would get together. DJ Cheb i Sabbah is more host than honcho on “Krishna Lila” (Six Degrees), gradually and respectfully adding bass lines and electronics as groups of musicians from north and south India perform devotional love songs called bhajans. Tabla Beat Science’s “Live in San Francisco at Stern Grove” (Axiom/Palm Pictures) is more multifarious and contentious. Tabla Beat Science is led by the producer and bassist Bill Laswell and the Indian tabla drummer Zakir Hussain, with the Ethiopian vocalist Gigi and the Indian sarangi (bowed lute) player and singer Ustad Sultan Khan and an Indian electronica duo, Midival Punditz, joining in. The live album moves from classical song to tabla-topped funk modeled on Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew”; it gives a scratching hip-hop disc jockey a duet with Hussain’s percussion and fuses Indian rhythms with dub reggae and drum-and-bass, hurtling across boundaries.
Qawwali, sung by Sufis from Pakistan, is Islamic devotional music that has galvanized secular audiences worldwide, especially through the concerts and recordings of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who died in 1997. “The Final Recordings” (American Recordings) is a typically intense performance, with drums, hand-claps and harmonium pushing Mr. Khan’s voice ever upward. The only hint of his failing health is that he cedes more improvisations to two singers, including his nephew, Rahat, who has been designated his official successor. Rahat Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who has released his own album, “Rahat” (American), has a higher, thinner voice than his uncle, and there are Khan kinfolk to rival him. Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali is led by two other nephews whose voices approach the gutsiness of their uncle’s, and the tunes on their album “A Better Destiny” (Real World) are basic and hard-driving enough to invite Westerners to join the call and response