Added this set today. It has a few hindi film songs at the top of the list too.

Posted some recordings today

A great artist he is without a question; though I got to listen to him only once in person, I was lucky to be able to listen to recordings of his music.

Doesn’t he love ‘parama purusham’ in lalitapanchamam – almost every other concert has this one !!

Added a bunch of concerts to the MDR page. All the new additions are uploaded on to archive.org too – you may find that the player from archive.org has some issues: stopping randomly and most of times does not like you moving the starting point within the track.

I have a few more concerts that i have to review (to avoid duplicates) and will be adding them.

He is another musician I have not had an opportunity to listen in person and added to that is the fact that I was quite unaware of him and his music for what i can say were my early listening time. Obviosuly it was my shortcoming and perhaps lack of initiative in looking for high quality musicians in those days.

It was indeed a rude surprise that I got to know of him and his music from my aunt Late Savitri Satyamurthy (violin) who used to accompany him in a lot of concerts. She not only got me hooked into his music but also helped me in getting hold of a copy of his Music Academy concert of 1985 !! One of the recordings below has my aunt accompanying in a radio concert 🙂

All I can say is that I enjoy his music tremendously and his unique approach in employing gamakams from minimal to the so called normal levels brings out a beauty that are beyond my ability to explain. One composition that left an indelible mark is ‘vEl edutta kaiyyE ‘ in toDi – not a very often heard composition.

Click here to go to the page

I have been receiving a number of requests on how one can download the mp3 files rather than have to stream the music all the time. I am sure people with some technical knowledge would have figured out this by now.
It is quite simple. Here is what you want to do on the page containing the music:

1. Click on the right mouse button and you will see a popup with a bunch of options
2. Select the ‘View Page Source’ option; note the exact text may differ between browsers
3. You will see that a new tab will open up with a load of HTML code
4. On this tab, click Ctrl and F keys together and you will a search box display – the location of this varies from browser to browser.
5. Search for “src=”https://shankarkrish”
6. The browser will point to one of the entries with the full mp3 file URL. For example “https://shankarkrish.s3.amazonaws.com/Music/MSG/54%20PSI-MSG-MSA-TVG%20Air.mp3”
7. Open a new tab in the browser and copy this URL to the URL area
8. You will see the audio controls and the music start playing
9. With the mouse on the audio control, click on the right mouse button and select the ‘Save video/audio as’ – this will save the file to your computer.

Let me know if you have any issues.

BTW you will be doing me a favor by downloading the mp3 files. I have these files sitting on Amazon cloud where storage is cheap, but I also get charged when people stream or download the files. I don’t mind these charges which are actually pretty small.  If you download and listen from your own machines, then Amazon will not charging me 🙂

WordPress was a great tool to use in publsihing the blog till recently. In the last few months, the visual editor that I use to create/update pages and he blog posts has been updated and that update has resulted in a miserable experience for me and looking at the posts on the web it seems to be a universal problem.

When I am working with posts containing little content there is no problem, but once the content gets beyond some threshold and also depending on the content in the page (links to audio files for example), the editor becomes quite unusable. Pasting links result in some random scrolling and on occassions the links are included as text etc which are tolerable. But on a page woth a lot of content, addition of content is like watching paint dry. The page is unresponsive for up to 20-30 seconds after a word or a few words are entered (frequency is quite random and sometimes for every character that I enter) and on occassion the information I have typed is lost in the cyberspace. The update to the MSG page was a cery frustrating experience that took about 3 hours to update. Finall i got all the content written out in Notepad and pasted to the page – even that resulted in errors and it was that third attempt that finally worked 😦

Reading thru the forums and looking at the behavior of the page, it appears that some fancy feature that they seem to have added results in an ajax call to their server each time I type a letter or word which results in poor performance (CPU utilization shoots up during this time);  and the problem becomes progressively worse with larger content and that was the problem I had to content with. I am shocked that the wordpress folks are letting this be the behavior of the editor. In the forums I did read that the problem is linked to the use of a plugin called yoast but I don’t have this on my site and leaves me wondering what these guys are really up to. I am posting this a problem on their forum and then wait and see what they have to say.

I had many more concerts of MSG from various times on my hard disk, but with the duplication of concerts and other issues meant that I had to find time to check and clean up the recordings first. Finally I managed to find time in the last 4-6 weeks and after long hours of checking for duplicates, checking the quality and combining tracks into a single recording etc, here some more concerts. Still have a half a dozen concerts to review and some Hindustani concerts. I have also added three more recordings of MSG-Emani duets – please see under the section for Duets.

Go to the MSG page and use the link at the top to get to the section with the updates to the MSG page.

Next set of concerts that I plan to work on is concerts of S. Ramanathan.

Added some concerts (actually this is all I have !) of this great artist.

Link to page

You will also find a couple of recordings in the page with the recordings from vinyl records.

Added some recordings of TVS 🙂

https://shankarkrish.wordpress.com/musical-musings/t-v-sankaranarayanan/

As I was typing his name in the blog and the page, I realized his name has one vowel occurring more times than the rest of the alphabets together !!

I have always loved his concerts, the vigor and enthusiasm with which sings and well planned concerts that typically leaves you wanting for more at the end of the concert.

In the forums, I have seen a lot of criticism about his seemingly limited repertoire which to me is total nonsense. Performers all around the world and as was his guru MMI knew that larger audience was key to the success of any concert and therefore choose to always sing pieces that they are known for and they have come to listen to – that in my view is his model for structuring his concerts. A careful review of performances of any leading musician will tell you the same story – not limited to the CM world. Can one think of any other reason why people still listen to a handful of hindi film songs from the 60’s and 70’s of Mohammad Rafi or Lata or Kishore Kumar?

In memory of his third death anniversary, added a couple of recordings to the MSG page.

An RTP in tODi from a concert in the 70’s along with his brother M S Anantaraman. It is a chaste rendering with absolutely no influence of hindustani idiom that I have listened to countless times.

In the tAnam portion, he uses pizzicato (plucking strings)  with such ease, clarity and gamakams too that makes it memorable.

Another standalone piece I listen very frequently is in bhavapriyA. Watch out for the sruti bEdam in the alapana part and the gati changes in the swarams portion.