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.

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

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

Added a page for Dwaram Venkataswamy Naidu, a great violinist of the last century. The page is still work in progress and will get updated over time.

His playing style is distinct and has a lot of influence from the western classical styles. He and MSG are the only ones who tune their violins to ‘F’ and that clearly brings out the tonal quality of the violin (which is built for even a higher pitch) – and that is clearly obvious in his recordings. One may find that he tends to sound harsh in numerous places, but my belief is that it is intentional – he believed in the model that while gayaki style is important, it cannot be overarching and that the versatility of the instrument and the player must be brought out too which may include playing in a manner that may sound harsh.

In one of the concerts he plays an RTP in ragam vardhani – his treatment of the ragam in the alapana and tanam (ragamailka) are fabulous.

Happy listening 🙂

Added a page for Madurai Somasundaram or Somu as he was called.

You can find quite a lot of recordings on youtube, but I have not heard many of the recordings that I have added on this page. This set is a much smaller set than what is posted for others, but each of them is a great listen.

He is one of the few who invariably sings swarams for the varnams.

Happy Listening.

Added a bunch of recordings in Rag Jaunpuri today. As we know a whole lot of film music (pick any language) is based on classical ragas with quirks added by the composer, specially if you look at the music from the 50’s and 60’s and later too in the south (Bharati Raja for instance). Even modern folks like A R Rehman use ragas; unfortunately i am not serious follower of film music and hence cannot point out examples.

Getting back to Jaunpuri, I found that my collection had a bunch of hindi film songs that are based on this rag. I have started off the page with at set – perhaps that will set the mood for the rag, before one settles down to listen to the remaining tracks. Frankly, some of the artists are totally unknown to me (have not heard of them and I did not try Googling for them).

If you are wondering my choice of rags for the posting of hindustani recordings, there are two reasons. As I mentioned earlier on, my HM recordings organized by rag !! Secondly it is based on requests. I am open for the next set of preferred rags that you would like me to post.

With the formal arrival of Spring, my thought is to consider Bahar which is supposed to be associated with spring. Spring did arrive where I live with snow showers leaving us wondering when we actually see the spring arriving 😦

Added the Abhogi Collection today.

Added some Hindustani recordings today. Much as I would like to organize them by artist, because of the way the recordings are organized on my drive, I am going to push recordings by the ‘rag’.

I have added Marwa and Shyam Kalyan as the set for today.

Shyam Kalyan by Venkatesh Kumar is a favorite of mine. Do check it out on the Shyam Kalyan Page.

A haunting recording that I listen very often is a short piece by Jitendra Abhisheki in Suha.

Added page for S Kalyanaraman. The recordings for him are nicely grouped based on violin accompaniment. So I am starting the page with MSG as the accompaniment first and then will follow up with others. Also, the concerts are broken down to the tracks level and that makes the upload process and setting up the page more time consuming. This page will be in an update mode for a reasonable period of time given the number of concerts that I need to upload.

Happy Listening.

I had stopped digitizing my cassettes 10+ years ago. The process was quite painful and so was the connecting the tape deck to the machine etc. Finding that I had concerts that were still not out in various sources of concerts, I started looking for options and in a short time I found this device and ordered it. I started digitizing some tapes and so far it has been a breeze !! For anyone looking to digitize, this walkman sized device is a great one to work.