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 (North Indian) Classical Music.

Bird & Beckett is pleased to present two concerts of Hindustani classical music on the last two Sundays in March, of which the first was a vocal recital by Pooja Chaudhuri accompanied by tabla player Ferhan Qureshi.  This second concert in the series reprises two previous Bird & Beckett duo appearances by Mallar Bhattacharya and Ferhan Qureshi.

Mallar Bhattacharya (sarode) is a student of the instumental and vocal music of the Acharya Baba Allauddin Seni gharana of Maihar and Rampur, India. Mallar began his musical training at the age of three, learning both Western and Hindustani violin from his father Dr. Jahar Bhattacharya, a viola student of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. After taking regular lessons from Ustad Aashish Khan in high school, Mallar was inspired to focus on the sarode as he began his undergraduate studies in Boston. Now a medical student in Boston, Mallar has been learning regularly for several years from Dr. George Ruckert, senior disciple of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, and he continues to study with Aashish Khan several times a year. Mallar has also spent two summers of dedicated study at Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, California, learning from Ustad Ali Akbar Khan.

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.

A little background on the music:  The Vedic chant tradition originated in ancient India some three thousand years ago, 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.