~incubating~

"Both the renderings have been selected for this special album, released from Questz World, on the Ustad-ji's 86th birth anniversary in January 2017, as they represent to a great extent his romanticism and originality in note-application, the emotional content of his musicality and unmatched technical excellence." i've read that radhika mohan maitra at some point gave up on riyaz and 'lost the will to live' (dying from an injury he should have survived) because the technicality of his music was not appreciated by calcuttan audiences; meanwhile elsewhere in the same city bahadur khan was busy drinking himself to death, i imagine for similar reasons. among sarodiyas i have heard, bahadur khan is clearly the most precise, the most quick-thinking and the most imaginative, but it turns out none of that is really all that relevant to a successful career. 26 minutes in dhamar (and actually doing dhamar-style layakari, not just 'being in dhamar taal') is a massive flex but who is around to care? - especially when you're also pissing off the purists by casually incorporating harmonic triads and 'chord progressions' into your ultra-oldschool badhat. so this style is simultaneously hopelessly outdated and bewilderingly progressive, in such a way as to expose, by contrast, the sloppiness (or half-assed-ness) of other musicians' versions of either extreme (which in some cases extends to insane disingenuousness) - in other words it stops just short of being 'an insult to practically everybody with any point of view at all' which i have to admit i really appreciate.

sharafat hussain khan attempts to sublimate the autistically dead-eyed disjointedness of modern(ity in) music (amir khan, osaka-style jiuta, grete sultan, the difference between arthur rubinstein's early and late chopin recordings - aestheticization of 'bare life'? of 'deterritorialization'?). 'absolute music' in the sense of grounding as edifice/object/archive rather than as moment of performance. merukhandi alap from faiyaz khan + ati vilambit khayal and 'disconnected-note taans' from amir khan + agra-gharana avoidance of doing emotion too mimetically = there's nothing here, no groove no vibe no song no melody, just inexorable forward motion through structure, which means everything, absolutely everything, is staked on voice 'itself', as timbre, as geometric line in space - but, of course, what a voice! (almost keyboard-like - but not a piano, a church organ) - and so the fundamental dare: is it enough?