BBC Proms 2022: Amjad Ali Khan (21 August 2022)

Sunday morning ragas in the Albert Hall, courtesy of sarod master Amjad Ali Khan, his sons Amaan and Ayaan, and two percussionists.  Amaan and Ayaan perform the opening raga before introducing their father to play (and also briefly sing) a solo spotlight, before all five musicians close the concert together.  The mostly uninteruppted drone, even under spoken annoucements and moments of retuning, gives the full programme a wonderful immersive flow, so download and enjoy an hour and a half of sublime meditation.

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Ustad Sabri Khan - Raga Darbari / Raga Multani (1991)

Two sublime, masterful ragas today from Ustad Sabri Khan (1927-2015).  Descended from a long line of distinguished musicians, Sabri Khan played the sarangi, an Indian stringed instrument with three melodic gut strings and 35 sympathetic resonant steel strings.

Said to be the instrument that most closely resembles the human voice, even more so than the cello, the sarangi is backed on this recording by tabla (played by Khan's son Ghulam Sarwar Sabri) and tanpura drone from Louise Günel.  The first raga is the 48-minute Darbari, meant to be a slow, sombre nightime raga, and the epic exploratory Alap section gives it its full emotional weight.  This is complemented well by the afternoon raga Multani, where the tablas are more strongly featured.  Beautiful meditative music, and highly recommended.

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Pandit Pran Nath - Raga Cycle, Palace Theatre, Paris 1972 (rel. 2006)

We're long overdue some raga goodness from the master Kirana singer on these pages.  Compared to the album release from the previous year (posted here), this brief live recording sets the accompanying instruments (played by Pran Nath's US students Terry Riley, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela) a bit further back in the mix, so that you appreciate all the better how that wonderful voice finds its way "in between the notes".

This archival release came out on Terry Riley's label in 2006, and in fact represents only a small excerpt of the ambitious Raga Cycle that the players undertook in Paris in May 1972: performing the 'night ragas' (those intended for playing at night) on a Friday night, the 'day ragas' on the Saturday, and the 'morning ragas' on the Sunday morning.  Raga Shudh Sarang and the brief Raga Kut Todi, featured here, are both late-morning ragas (from my admittedly limited research on the fascinatingly complex rules of Indian classical music), so must have been from the Sunday morning concert.  Wonder if Riley or Young have any more in their archives?

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Pandit Pran Nath - Ragas (1971)

Listened to this back-to-back with the Glass/Schleiermacher album (see previous post) the other day for maximum mindwarp whilst walking home in the sunshine, so made sense to close out the week by posting these two spellbinding ragas.

Pran Nath's life story is fascinating, and I highly recommend reading up - for starters, here's a short wiki article and a fascinating albeit lengthy essay.  But all I'm going to do today is share the music - an eternal twin-tambura drone (one of the players being uber-minimalist La Monte Young) reverberating through every cell in your body from the first second, and that voice... that voice.  Whether pouring down like honey around the exacting, complex notes and modes proscribed to each raga, or rising in ecstatic spiritual release towards the end of each piece, this is a voice I could listen to forever.

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