Musical Adventures

Quick social notes...

We went to see Ravi Shankar (and his daughter Anoushka) at the Overture Center on Tuesday, which was pretty awesome. Nothing like a good raga to get the week off to a rocking start. Somehow, I need to arrange a duet between a good sitar player and a good Uilleann piper. It'll be about 7 musicians worth of noises.

The weirdest thing was the two guys playing the tanpura in the background. As near as I can tell, this is an instrument which you tune ahead of time and just sort of strum as a drone while the sitar and flute and tablas rock out in front. They just sat there with these sort of lute things and plucked them with one hand through the whole concert. It hardly seemed worth their while. Maybe you have to put in your time on the tanpura before they let you play a sitar.

I also liked the piece they played which was a Spring raga, played in a rythymic cycle with 11 beats - two measures of 4 beats and two measures of one and a half beats. Oy. Makes slip jigs seem almost sensible.

And we're off to see the Old Crow Medicine Show Saturday. It's a good week.