Added a page for M Balamuralikrishna today.

https://shankarkrish.wordpress.com/musical-musings/m-balamuralikrishna/

Happy Listening 🙂

While growing up in the 70s, Radio and LP player at home was the main source of music; In the early 80s while staying in the US, I came into buying a bunch of Vinyls from labels like ‘Nonesuch Records’ of KVN, Ramnad Krishnan etc who were recorded during their visits to Wesleyan in the 60’s.

These records and many others that were purchased in the 70s have been sitting with me waiting for some action from perhaps. And a couple of months ago, my daughter Kavita who spent 7 weeks in Maine returned with a couple of Vinyls (Western Classical music) that she got for a couple of dollars from a library.

I have added a page with the recordings from these records.

https://shankarkrish.wordpress.com/musical-musings/from-vinyl-records/

I did not digitize the single 78 RPM record of M S Subbulakshmi I have. The player refuses to go past 3 minute mark and the record seems to have at least 20 seconds of music left on each side. If I do change my mind in digitizing the truncated version I will do that in the future.

After a long hiatus, got myself to do some work today.

I added some concerts to the K V Narayanaswamy page. I will be adding a few more in the coming days; I am listening to them before pushing them here to be sure that the quality of recording is decent at the least. The house concert is an interesting one which has Palakkad Mani Iyer playing kanjira while his son Rajamani plays the mridangam. In the tani avartanam, it is Mani Iyer who takes the lead role !! He is an awesome kanjira player too.

On the hindustani front, I added the page for Raag Lalith today. It has a few hindi film songs at the top of the list too.

https://shankarkrish.wordpress.com/musical-musings/hindustani-recordings/lalith-collection/

The last track is by Venkatesh Kumar, which reminds me of listening to him recently.

Earlier this month, I visited my mother in Chennai. I found that there was a 3 day festival arranged by Alarmel Valli at Kalakshetra. On day 2 (my full day in Chennai) the festival had two concerts of Pt. Venkatesh Kumar and Ranjani-Gayatri – this was too good to miss and went to the event with my mother.

It was the first time for me getting into Kalakshetra, leave alone listening anything there; Though I had seen it from outside, I had no idea about the inside. It is a gorgeous place and on entering you get  the feeling of having gone back a few decades in Chennai/Tamilnadu; in some ways similar how it was on getting back into the IIT campus in Mumbai/Chennai. The auditorium with thatched roof and low lighting reminiscent of hurricane lights with a beautiful stage setting.

Venkatesh Kumar sang for 90 minutes with the first hour going into Purya Dhanasri, which in my limited knowledge of HM was excellent.