More Monsoon Music Memories from Kolkata!!

Monsoon Music in India 2010-2011:

Monsoon Music comprises of saxophonist & brothers Jonathan and Andrew Kay, along with bassist Justin Gray from Toronto, Canada.  For the past three years they have been learning Indian Classical Raga music from Vocalist Shantanu Bhattacharyya.  The three Jazz musicians are attempting to learn the traditional music from North India and apply it to their native Western Instruments. 

This blog is an excerpt from the latest entry of their TravelPod.com blog, accounting their travels, adventures, and experience in India. You can find the original blog in it's entirety HERE.

For more information regarding Monsoon Music, please visit www.monsoon-music.com, or contact them through, [email protected]

At one of Gurujee's concerts, there was a a great father-son jugalbandi performance, some of which I filmed from sidestage with my new iPod Touch and 8mm app.  Just a taste of what hanging around backstage at a Raga concert.

We attended two nights of The Dover Lane Festival, which is one of the oldest and most well known Raga Festivals in the World!!  Each night featured 4 or 5 of the top performers, each with up to 2 hours of performance time each. The highlight for us was seeing Kushal Das perform Raga Hemant, which you can see a short video below, and our Guru's Guru Ajoy Chakrabarty. We hope that one day all of you will be able to experience an all night Indian concert, especially one as prodigious as the Dover Lane.
 
Saraswati Pooja is an important holiday, especially for all artists, musicians and educators.  Saraswati is the godess of Knowledge, Music and the Arts.  She is the consort of Brahma, but mostly remains in the Brahmalok (the region of Lord Brahma) in order to gain more knowledge from him. Saraswati is considered to be the 'mother of the Vedas'.  Typically on Saraswati pooja, people don't read books or play music and instead offer them to the idol.  Part of the pooja is to make the idol and pandal out of interesting materials and in creative ways.  Gurujee celebrates the day by offering his music all day.  We spent many hours singing songs and playing our instruments with Gurujee and his other students. It was a truly beautiful offering of music and songs with a great group of people.  We attended a house concert at our friend Subhankar Banerjee's to celebrate Saraswati Pooja and support a charity that he started in his late mothers name.

On our first trip we met a wonderful man, who is considered the best bansuri maker in India!! Deboda Prosad Banerjee had a great impact on us during our meetings our first trip.  He told us stories of Kolkata in the time when he was growing up and he adventures to the USA with Steve Gorn.  He also told us he met and played with Dave Liebman, who at the time we had just met performed with at the Humber Artist in Residence concert during our second year at Humber.  When we returned to Canada and met Dave Liebman again when he was playing in Toronto, we chatted about our trip to India, and before we could mention Deboda he went into a story of meeting an amazing Bansuri maker and player.  We quickly mentioned Deboda's name and just like that all the way across the world almost thirty years later we had all met each other and rekindled those past memories from their first meeting.  We really feel fortunate to have met such amazing musicians, so we went to visit Deboda recently and catch up.  We had a great hang, talking about our first meeting, playing some of his amazing bansuris and just chatting about life.  We played him some Raga music on our Saxophones, which he loved and expressed his appreciation for our dedication and interest in Indian Classical music.  He even tried my sax!!

Contributed by: Andrew Kay from Monsoon Music. The original blog entries can be viewed HERE.

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