OVERVIEW OF INDIAN MUSIC RELEASED
Imagine a multimedia presentation of music, words and visuals spanning 500 years of a culture’s myth, folklore, religion and popular music.
That’s what one finds in ``The Raga Guide,‘’ a 196-page illustrated book accompanied by four CDs that offers the first comprehensive look at the origins and history of the raga, a traditional form of Hindu music.
This project, the result of fifteen years of work by leading raga scholars and some of the finest musicians in the field, is a document of absolutely historic proportions lavishly recorded and presented by Nimbus records.
At the outset of the project, the late scholar-musician Dilip Chandra Vedi was asked to compile samples of what he identified as the most important, core Hindustani ragas, the melodic underpinnings of the classical music of Northern India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh.
His first reaction was to turn down the assignment, declaring it to be an impossible task, but he went on to lay the foundations for this incredible work, which is justifiably dedicated to his memory.
Most Western exposure to ragas has been in the form of the lengthy improvisations encouraged by their musical structure. Ravi Shankar, for example, can fill an entire concert set with a single composition.
But these 74 ragas, performed by flutist Hariprasad Chaurasia, sarodist Buddhadev DasGupta and vocalists Shruti Sadolikar-Katkar and Vidyadhar Vyas accompanied by several different tabla players, are condensed to their essence in brilliant, evocative three- to six-minute performances.
The awe-inspiring sonorities and ululations by the vocalists transport the listener with spine-tingling beauty, and Chaurasia’s flute performance is haunting beyond imagination, a cry of pastoral emotion guaranteed to raise your consciousness and lower your blood pressure.
The ragas are accompanied by both Indian and Western notation, an explanation of the meaning of each piece, and 40 full-color reproductions of ragamala paintings inspired by the stories behind the ragas themselves.
Either as a casual introduction to some of the world’s most breathtaking musical forms, or as a crucial text for a lifetime’s worth of study, ``The Raga Guide’’ is an indispensable work and is likely to remain so in perpetuity.
(John Swenson writes about popular music and is editor of ‘‘The Rolling Stone Jazz Record Guide’’ and ``The Rolling Stone Jazz and Blues Album Guide.‘’ He can be reached online at Pltrhd(at)aol.com. Opinions expressed here are his own.)