which way west? Sunday concert series.
All ages welcome!
No cover charge, but your generous donations
make it possible for us to pay the musicians.

Sunday, March 24 – 4:30-6:30 pm: Hindustani Classical Vocal Recital.

Perhaps as long as three thousand years ago, the Vedic chant tradition originated in ancient India, setting the Sanskrit Vedas in metrical form for oral transmission.  The North Indian (Hindustani) and South Indian (Carnatic) musical traditions diverged in about 1200 CE from this common root, both comprising other elements as well, and continuing to this day to be the principal traditions of Indian classical music with their own highly developed conventions, practices and repertoire.  For both, melodic modes, the ragas, are combined with metrical beat cycles, the talas.  Hindustani music adds to the Vedic material melodic ideas from Persian Sufi folk traditions among other sources, and was developed through the work of numerous eminent composers such as Tansen (1493-1584) of the Mughal era.

Indian classical music, Hindustani and Carnatic alike, is very much about improvisation, its beauty in performance derived from the tradition coupled with the well-schooled artist’s skills and intuition, as he or she works through brilliantly imagined permutations of the material, combining notes and scales at different tempos in the moment.

Suffice to say, the music is rich and complex, and we would venture that it is far more important to experience the music in performance than to be satisfied with any written account — though we would not hesitate to recommend making a study of the available texts.

We are proud to present two concerts of Hindustani classical music at Bird & Beckett on the last two Sundays in March, the first of which is this vocal recital by Pooja Chaudhuri accompanied by the fine tabla player Ferhan Qureshi.

Pooja Chaudhuri began learning Hindustani classical vocal music at the age of five; at age 16, she began study with Habib Khan saab of the Indore gharana.  Having graduated from UC Berkeley in 2011, a year of study followed at Ustad Raashid Khan saab’s music academy in Kolkata, West Bengal.  She is now pursuing her training under Ujjawal Dutta saab, who is based in Kolkata and is himself a student of the late maestro Jagdish Prasad of the Patiala gharana.

Ferhan Najeeb Qureshi is a senior disciple of the legendary tabla master Ustad Tari Khan. Prior to his ongoing training with Ustad Tari Khan, Ferhan took his initial lessons in Hindustani music theory and practice with Surinder Singh Mann.  Ferhan studies the Punjab gharana of classical tabla which both of his teachers represent. In addition to performing tabla lehara (tabla solo), Ferhan Qureshi has also accompanied numerous distinguished classical artists (vocalists, instrumentalists and dancers) both in the United States and in Pakistan.