This video with pictures taken from the worldwideweb features the Side A-second track of a great, very well produced&recorded; album 'The Music Of India', a mid-seventies release, however, with no mentioning of a recording date. It's an album by the legendary veena player S(undaram) Balachander (1927-1990), who was a child prodigy, a multi-instrumentalist (but the veena became his specialty and his favourite instrument) and a mostly self taught musician. The album means a lot to me, as it was the first Indian classical music record I owned (I remember I bought it together with a nice album by North Indian sitar and surbahar player Narendra Bataju). This was in 1978, I was 14 then, and this album surely was one of the great 'big bangs' in my listener's career. Of course I had already been listening to Ravi Shankar at 'Woodstock' and the 'Concert for Bangla Desh' - stuff that came to me via the record collection of an older brother - but at the time I found the music of S. Balachander far more impressive. His veena playing was simply mindblowing! Just listen and you'll understand what I mean. S. Balachander's sound is unmistakeable his own, one of the many trademarks being his unique strong 'attaque' on the veena strings, that helps him to bring out the depth and intensity of a raag. His veena playing is unmatched and always 'avant garde' in the true sense of the word. I'm sure evry musician involved in improvising music -from whatever genre of music or cultural background- will immediately recognize Balachander's genius and be inspired by his playing. Balachander is accompanied on mridangam by Sri Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman (1935), the greatest and most influential player of his generation. Some of the pictures show S. Balachander and K. Sivaraman, showing them at a much older age than when they were doing this recording. The song that is played is 'Neethumahima' in raag 'Hamsanandhi', thalam is Aadhi. for some biographical information on S. Balachander, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundaram_Balachander and http://www.geocities.com/usivaraman.geo/home.html is K. Sivaraman's homepage. Hope you'll enjoy this top performance!

• published: 05 Jul 2008
• views: 61550