Shakti - Set the stage on Fire

To start with, Shakti is a fusion team which has been in and out of existance from the 1970s, undergoing nothing less than metamorphoses (the plural). The current Shakti team comprised out Zakir Hussain, Srinivas (better known as Mandolin Srinivas), Shankar Mahadevan, John McLaughlin and Selva Ganesh. They're touring India and on Sunday, 23rd Jan, they performed in Lalitha Kala Thoranam, Public Gardens.
The show started around 45 minutes late, which was attributed to the delay in frisking the artists from Mumbai to Hyderabad. They performed for around 2.5 hours, and the performance, simply put, was extra-ordinary.

I should say I was exhausted after the two-hour show because of the strenuous clapping at the end of each song. But I have no idea how Zakir Hussain could keep up hitting the tabla for almost the entire two-hour show. And man, he doesn't play it as slow as you would think. He's amazingly fast, and once in a while, the quality of the speakers wasn't good enough to match the speed. The bits merged together in a frenzy driving us mad. Zakir is also famous for the improvizations he does, playing notes with his tabla perfoming a jugal bandi with the mandolin and guitar.

Though I missed the violin of Shankar, we had our own Srinivas with his mandolin. The mandolin is like a guitar, the difference being that the sound is a bit more sonorous and sustains longer. Initially, I was not very impressed with the sound of this instrument, and had a lump in my throat for missing the violin. But Srinivas unleashed his provess in one particular song with a little help from Zakir and the crowd started swaying. From a slow strum to frenzied very high-pitch notes, each bit was impeccable. We were amazed at the control he showed when playing at blazing speeds.

I have no idea if Shankar Mahadevan is a part of the team or if he was invited to fill a vacant position. But to me, it looked like Shankar Mahadevan spent quite some time practicing with the other members of the team. Shankar merged his voice with the mandolin and guitar and the blended sound was a real melody. Me and many of my friends have a misconception that for melody, you need to have the song paced moderately low. But Shankar Mahadevan plays with the swaras really fast and keeps each sound distint from the other. Shankar walked out of the show midway to let the instrumentalists take over and returned back towards the end, releasing another torrent of swaras, stimulating our senses and throwing us wild. But I felt that Shankar didn't perform to the very best of his abilities in this show.

"Pundit" John McLaughlin, as Zakir Hussain introduced him, is a world renowned Guitarist, with several solo hit albums to his name. He took special intrerest in Indian Classical and really moves the crowd with his guitar playing karnatic and hindustani classical. Out of all the members, I felt John preferred slow and swaying music with some special effects from his electric guitar. The way he played "Lotus feet" was so mesmerising that you would close your eyes and float about in a green landscape filled with lots of colourful flowers. Yes, you can say I am imagining things, but if a music can induce such imagination, then this world seriously needs such music.

Selva Ganesh is famous for his Kanjira, but he played more of his Ghatam and Mridangam today. He was accompanying Zakir most of the time, and we didn't have an opportunity to appreciate his abilities as it was hard for us to distunguish the sounds of tabla and mridangam. But Selva Ganesh took some time and granted a solo performance, which was totally out-standing. His rather loud-mridangam kept on going throwing the crowd into waves of applause.

Another major disappointment was the absence of Pundit Hariprasad Chaurasia with his flute (or since he plays a lot of hindustani classical - bansuri). He's another great musician this team has as an asset, but couldn't accompany the team due to reasons best known to the team.

For more than two hours, the best musicians India has taken a modest crowd for a ride over beautiful landscapes and mercilessly threw us back in the mundane world we belonged to. For two hours, we were in extacy and it finally has to come to an end. One marked quality of this team is the speed. They play it so fast that you keep swaying. It is not the usual musical concert where the performers play it at normal speeds, but display perfection in what they play. The Shakti team has crossed all these little goals and have grown much beyond the basic classical music.

The way they have created this fusion music with title "Shakti" really sets the stage on fire and the crowd is picked up by the resulting hurricane. I really wished the performance could last longer, as it landed us back into our mundane world with a visible "thump".

Ipromised myself that If there are more shows of this kind and I get to know of it, I wouldn't miss it for anything in this world.