Did you know (and I am sure you did not) that what enables the extraordinary sliding notes on the sarod (pronounced ‘saroad’) is the fact that you press the strings on the fretless board of the instrument not with your finger tips, as with virtually all other stringed instruments, but with the tip of your finger nail? Given how small a compass the tip of a finger nail has, it is almost impossible to believe that you could cover so many notes at such speed and express so much feeling with so little purchase. But Soumik does – and did for us at a wonderfully intimate gathering on Thursday evening.
There is something very special for both performer and audience in very small groups. The performer can really connect with his or her audience – from even a relatively small stage the audience is so often just a disembodied dark blob with whom it is hard to establish a relationship. For the audience you get to see the performer working with their instrument in glorious close up – something you can rarely do in a concert hall, even with a pair of binoculars. And then there is the intimacy of the event itself which frees the artist not just to play but to talk about their instrument, the background to the piece, the experiences which inspired its writing or that performance – and the audience to ask questions, or interact with the performer.
And all of that happened on Thursday evening when Soumik introduced us to his sarod and then treated us to some beautiful traditional Indian music, some of his own recent compositions which are deeply rooted in classical Indian music – and we met his fridge!! Here he is talking about his sarod and then playing us a gentle mediative piece, an alap, which would be played at the start of a classical Indian concert to create an appropriately receptive mood.
In this piece whose name I am not going to attempt as my rendering would be so horribly inaccurate, Soumik not only played but sang – after giving us a first lesson in sarod playing.
Other pieces included exciting Koali music (in which the tempo accelerates to a frenzied conclusion) and several of Soumik’s own compositions – one of which included the base notes of his locked-down fridge.
(Casting around for something – anything – creative to do during lockdown he started recording everyday sounds in his flat and in the street. People chatting, playing pingpong, cutlery clattering, his kettle boiling, his fridge humming – then playing with them electronically and incorporating them into his music.)
To hear more…
But if you would like to hear his fridge in full flow you will need to book in to one of his upcoming tour concerts as he promises that it will be among the pieces they will play.
- The tour is UK wide in October and November – details here on his Instagram feed.
- Meanwhile, if you know someone at Dishoom you might just be able to swing a ticket to their Indian Independence evening on Monday night at King’s Cross for which Soumik has written a piece – although the event is, sadly, currently sold out.
- And keep an eye on the Barbican booking site as on October 21st he will be performing at Milton Court with the BBC singers who have also commissioned him to write a piece to celebrate Indian independence but also to remember the anguish that the subsequent partition brought to so many.
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