A musical/audiophile journey in the USA (part two)
I often wonder if it was a good idea for a confused person like me to emigrate to the United States, for the United States is a very confusing country. Take for example the metal subculture. I was a Metalhead when I landed in Los Angeles in 2003, but when I left via San Francisco thirteen years later in 2016, I wanted nothing to do with Metal music. In India, I would instantly connect with other Metal heads, but in the States, I felt quite uncomfortable amongst them and this chilled my love for metal music as well.
The departure of Metal left a gaping void in my musical life. Being a broke grad student didn’t help either. Penniless, sleep-deprived, hungry, lonely, I needed some new music to soothe my soul.
My department, Media Arts and Technology (MAT), under whose auspices I worked was a confused department as well. It was too new, too underfunded, still in search of an identity — just like me. An interdisciplinary department, it brought together students and faculty from the Music, Electrical (EE), Computer Science and the Arts department. It was here that I met David, a fellow student, a double-major in EE and Music from U of Michigan, and my new bestie. He introduced me to the contemporary music scene (Radiohead, Coldplay, Weezer).
I heard Coldplay’s first album, and only the first song “Yellow” was hummable. I heard their latest “A Rush of Blood to the Head”, and it didn’t get my blood rushing anywhere. I heard Radiohead, but I couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. David thought Radiohead was the new Beatles. Pathbreaking. Genre-bending. But I wasn’t enlightened enough. I just found them (and Coldplay) whiny. True, they had plenty to whine about, Napster and big bad Internet had only recently destroyed the Music industry and their livelihoods; but still, that didn’t excuse whiny music. Meanwhile every time I called home, my brother kept pleading with me to try Bob Dylan. And like (almost) every elder brother on planet Earth who still sees his younger sibling as the little imp tailing him everywhere, I ignored him.
Until someone from India visited me one day, and I bought a CD of Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde to send back home for my brother. On a whim, I tore open the seal, and plopped the CD into my Sony Discman. The CD never went back. I played Visions of Johanna, fifty times a week every week. No longer an innocent imp; my brother, to me, was now, a precocious prophet. Those years of grad school — two of them — I consumed all famous Dylan albums. Even today, my favourite Dylan song is Visions of Johanna (but there are others toppled Tangled Up in Blues, Like a Rolling stone, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, Masters of War, Blowing in the wind, Sad-eyed Lady of Lowlands, Hurricane, One more cup of coffee . . . the list goes on).
Dylan, to me, was the summit; but David disagreed. For him, it was the Beatles: Beatles tracks were perfect rock’n roll compositions; and Dylan just felt — incomplete, he would say. I couldn’t argue with a music major; but just like Radiohead, I couldn’t dig Beatles. I liked some (Norwegian Wood, Strawberry Fields, Help!) but it wasn’t anything electrifying. For me, the Beatles were a just a pretty package, like that sweet, gorgeous girl, who did nothing wrong and struck all the right chords; while Dylan’s music was an elemental force of nature, she was a storm that blew you off your feet, that grabbed you by the collar, reached down your throat, and gripped your thumping heart and wouldn’t let go.
Perhaps there are two camps of Rock n’ Roll fans. The Beatle-maniac and Dylan-ist. And most people are just one or the other.
Bob Dylan performed at our university just before I graduated. I still have those ticket stubs. David wasn’t interested and I went with my roommate. But it wasn’t the same Dylan. I was aware that his voice has changed, and none of the new renditions had any resemblance to the old classics; I was aware that this was my failing that I was still stuck in the seventies-Dylan, but it was not within my power to look at him afresh, much later, though I heard his new albums, I still missed the Bob Dylan from ”Blonde on Blonde” era. A few months later after this concert I moved to San Francisco.
Like sulphur, charcoal, saltpeter cocktailing into gunpowder; my musical life exploded in San Francisco. Here, as a consequence of access to live concerts, a budding Audiophile hobby (see link), and the uniquely San Franciscan Amoeba music store; the bubble, I was living in, burst open.
After the penury of grad school, a bi-weekly pay check kicked ass. I splurged my first salary on my first audiophile system (NAD 3010, CD Player, Haydn Grand Speakers).
The Amoeba SF, inhabiting a converted bowling alley, was a 24,000 sq ft area with twenty foot ceiling. It was filled with hundred of thousands of CDs, LPs, DVDs, posters, books. LP covers and posters adorned the walls. There were listening stations every ten feet. A stage for local musicians to perform. Everywhere you looked, there was the small-time musician type — all pierced and tatted and mohawk-ed — browsing LPs. At Amoeba, you could sell your old music CDs/Vinyl for credit and buy new music — it was a music lover’s Mecca.
There, I bought a green CD (mis-)titled “Psychedelic India”. If Dylan’s poetry through my Sony Discman opened me to the vicissitudes of life; Ustad Amir Khan’s Raga Marwa from the green CD through the magic mid-ranged of a tubed amplifier [I upgraded from NAD to a Jolida Tube amplifier] gave me a taste of spiritual colours of the after-life.
Attending a Blues live concert by Taj Mahal, introduced me to African Music (Vieux Farka Toure, the African Blues, and Ali Farka Toure. Which also led to Toumani Diabate and his kora). Toumani’s Kaira CD, bought from Amoeba, was my music companion through a 8000 km road trip across the USA. (Toumani’s collaborations with Ali Farka Toure — In The Heart of the Moon — and his Mande Variations were the staples in my new Japanese tube-based CD player by Triode Corporation).
Sure, I had heard jazz. I had bought a 4-CD Best of Charley Parker. But it wasn’t until I placed an LP of Saxophone Colossus under the needle of a newly-bought vinyl player that I fell in love with jazz. It was cheap vintage Sony vinyl player. There’s nothing better than listening to jazz on vinyl.
The tunes of St. Thomas, its first track, still play in my head from those crispy cold San Francisco mornings — my eyes still barely open, mouth still tinged with minty Pepsodent; the tube amp glowing, the needle popping onto a spinning record. And with that calypso beat in my feet, I would toddle to work, ready for it to throw anything upon me.
Then later on yet another weekend trip to Amoeba, I purchased an LP of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. It became my morning standard. My Suprabhatam (When I was young. We would start the day at home with MS Subbulakshmi’s singing the Suprabhatam, which literally (translated from Sanskrit) means “auspicious dawn”. A collection of hymns to awaken the deity in South Indian temples). Coltrane’s A Love Supreme was for me the Western Hemisphere’s Suprabhatam.
Nowhere in the world could I have experienced music as I did in America, but America’s view of the world was quite befuddling; often, to my great surprise, myopic in nature. For instance, their classification of music from around the world.
Finding two of my three current favourite musicians — Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road project, Kayhan Kalhor [third being Zakir Hussein] — in a CD bin titled “World Music” was a good case in point. Music originating from Euro-America had genres and sub-genres — Pop, Rock, Punk, Metalcore, Alternative… — but those originating in India, Pakistan, China, Mongolia, West Asia, Mali etc — Bollywood, Qawwali, Traditional, African Blues … — didn’t seem to deserve the honour and were ghettoised under a catch-all “World Music” genre. And then there was Fusion Music. Collaborations between the greats (Ravi Shankar and Yehudi Menuhin, Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Toure, Kayhan Kalhor and Shujaat Hussein, Zakir Hussein and Bela Fleck) all dumped under “World Music”.
My first experience of Fusion music was an album from the artist who began it all: Ravi Shankar. The title of the album, a collaboration between Ravi Shankar and Yehudi Menuhin, called “West meets East”. The music was heavenly but its title very confusing. What was West? What was East?
Yehudi Menuhin lived in Europe — West, but was of Jewish origin — East? Ravi Shankar was of India origin — East, but lived in USA — West? Both the Violin and the Sitar had their origins from lutes of Ancient Persia and China, West or East? Or is the music genre. Western classical originated from church music. Where did the Christianity originate? ”East”, right?
However most Fusion music unlike the excellent West meets East sessions is eminently forgettable. There are several types. First: Western man goes East, learns under a guru, comes back with a new twang spicing up his playing (Harry Manx comes to mind). Second: Famous rock musician discovers Eastern music and craves the new sounds. (“The Long Road” by Eddie Vedder featuring Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan comes to mind. The guitar chords strums start the song, the Qawwali harmonium drones join in, Eddie’s hypnotic vocals reaches a crescendo, and Nusrat breaks into an alap, individually each section is brilliant but as a whole it doesn’t quite come together.) Also more famously, The Beatles. Third: The new globalised generation taking their father’s “tired-old-traditional” music and making it cool by adding a electric guitar, drum kit, or techno. (Rahat Fateh Ali adding a November Rain style guitar riff to his father’s Qawwali tunes; gen-Z kids featured in Rolling Stone (India) playing heavy metal on a Sitar; most Coke studio productions; Vieux Farka Toure, adding techno beats to African Blues, in UFOs over Bamako; most of Anoushka Shankar’s catalogue).
Then there is the fourth kind: Two stalwarts come together, they learn each other’s tradition, a new composition is rendered, or an existing composition is seen through new eyes, and what comes out is a production that is far greater than the sum of its parts (Like Yo-Yo Ma, a cello player, learning and then playing the Mongolian Morin Khuur for the orchestral composition Legend of Herlen; Zakir Hussein’s collaborative performances in SFJAZZ; every one of Kayhan Kalhor’s albums). They are unforgettable. It’s music that stays with you, becomes part of the canon, and personally it’s music I come back to — again and again.
Zakir Hussein, Yo-Yo Ma, Kayhan Kalhor, Yehudin Menuhin, Ravi Shankar. These are musicians at the pinnacle of their craft. Is it only musicians who breathe such rarified air who produce good Fusion?
Not necessarily. Take for example Vieux Farka Toure, son of the famous African Blues guitarist Ali Farka Toure, although his ”UFOs over Bamako” album is merely interesting, his collaboration with Idan Raichel, an Israeli keyboardist in the Toure-Raichel Project album, The Paris Sessions, is brilliant. On the other hand, “Ancient Music”, by Sarod legend Ali Akbar Khan and Oud maestro Rahim AlHaj, misses the boat. You can hear the personal signatures of AlHaj and Ali Akbar in the melodies but the music doesn’t meld very well, it doesn’t exceed the sum of it parts like the Toure-Raichel Project. The album is salvaged only because Hindustani music and Iraqi music have a shared history and similar musical forms.
When two traditions of music meet as equals — without the Orientalist baggage of East/West or the next generation’s need to westernise the traditional; when there is the willingness of the two artistes to make a single portrait; then and only then Good Fusion music results.
But Good Fusion music is so rare enough that to say Good Fusion seems oxymoronic. So I prefer to refer to it as a new genre of ”International Jugalbandhi”. Jugalbandhi — an Indian classical music term that literally means “entwined twins”, is a popular and well-practised art of collaboration with equality and melding of forms at its roots.
International Jugalbandhis are my favourite genre of music. After isn’t all music a fusion of various indigenous forms. Didn’t Jazz come from African musical forms fusing with Western Classical? Rock ’n Roll from the Rhythm & Blues music of black people? Hindustani classical from Persian musical forms fusing with indigenous Indian music?
In 2013, SFJAZZ centre opened in San Francisco. It became my new Mecca. Zakir Hussein was the artist-in-residence. His concerts, his musical projects, his collaborations with artistes, genres, compositions, and forms from around the world were a treasure to witness. I even saw Kayhan Kalhor perform in that intimate venue, where I splurged on front-row seats for me and my parents who were visiting. He and Ali Bahrami Fard played — my favourite instrumental album of all time — I Will Not Stand Alone”. I got introduced to (Africal) Female vocals . (Christina Salem, Buika, Rokia Traore.) And contemporary Jazz artistes (like Esperenza Spalding, Cecil McLorin Salvant, John Santos). Christine Salem’s voice — all her lyrics were French — was unlike any I ever heard. I bought a lot of their CDs from Amoeba. I upgraded my audiophile system (Upgraded my speakers (Mozart Grand -> Verity Parsifal -> Devore), my amplifiers [Jolida -> Triode -> Pass Labs -> Shindo … -> 300b SET amps], my CD players [Jolida -> Triode -> Benchmark -> Wavelength … -> AMR]) .
It all went in tandem. Each obsession —Buying CDs from Amoeba, Audiophilia, Live Concerts — fuelling the other.
One of the greatest musical events of my life was to see Sonny Rollins live. I was sitting on the balcony directly above him. He was 84 years old, with a bent back and needed help getting on the stage, but once he put the saxophone to his lips, everything changed. He had the energy, the power, the vibrancy, the lilt of a 25-year old Sonny Rollins playing in New York. I saw Roy Haynes the drummer, 93 years of age, playing at the Healdsburg Jazz Festival. He had more energy, more verve than his sons and grandsons who were also on the stage with him playing the cornet and the saxophone. He was joshing with audience, drinking red wine, teasing the MC. Music is truly the fountain of youth that musicians drink from.
The finale of my musical journey in the USA came with witnessing Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project perform their album “Sing me Home”. I sat in the seat and felt like they were singing for me, they were sending me off — home. Since I heard their first album in 2010, for five years I was tracking their movements, but missing every appearance; either too late, sold out or too far away. And I caught them. Two of out the holy trinity — Yo-Yo Ma, Kayhan Kalhor but not Zakir Hussein — were on stage. Just two months before I left the USA for good in 2016.
I sold everything, except my speakers [Devore Orangutans], amplifiers [Frankenstein 300b SET], CD player [AMR DP-777], 400CDs and 100 LPs which I shipped back to India via sea. The system I shipped back was attuned to the music I enjoyed in San Francisco (Jazz and Instrumentals).
And on my iPhone, playing the “Sing me Home” album, I flew myself home to Mumbai, to a new set of adventures and new confusions of an expat returning home to a country not quite the one that he left. A newly globalised India, as alien to him, and even more befuddling as the country he just left behind. Sigh.
