Baajaa Gaajaa offers more than music - it is a panorama of Indian styles and world perspective.
Sweet music fills the air this weekend as Pune hosts the third edition of the Baajaa Gaajaa music festival at Ishanya Mall. The annual event, curated by singer Shubha Mudgal and percussionist Aneesh Pradhan, is a melting pot of musical genres. This year’s itinerary includes folk styles from Kerala (Sopana Sangeetham), tribal music from Gujarat (Dangi) and innovative collaborations between Niladri Kumar (sitar) and Satyajit Talwalkar (tabla) with Juan Diego (flamenco guitar).
This three-day event, inaugurated on February 4 and ending today, is dedicated to the diversity of Indian music and to musicians, instrument makers, gurus, innovators, technical experts and music lovers. The festival features performances, workshops, exhibitions, expositions, seminars and film screenings on different aspects of music.
“We are delighted that the first two festivals [in 2009 and 2010] met with a good public response and provided an interactive space to musicians, music lovers, scholars, instrument makers, publishers and a host of organisations and individuals connected with music-making,” says Mudgal. “We are looking forward to welcoming Punekars and music lovers from across the country and abroad to the festival. For many music lovers in India, music only means one thing: the form they listen to. That’s why diversity is the main purpose of Baajaa Gaajaa, to expose people to new styles, and to remind them that music doesn’t mean only classical, nor is it only film music.”
Inaugurating the event on Friday, actor-director-writer and theatre personality Girish Karnad said, “The Indian music scene is ready for such festivals. People may say this is not a true representation of the Indian classical music scene, but then everything does not need to be similar. In fact the fusion of various styles promotes a better understanding of music.”
Karnad points out that the face of Indian music has changed over the last half-century. “Take a look at the way the West perceived Indian classical music 50 years ago,” he says, “and compare it with the present day. There is a world of difference. In fact, now they admit that the music here is much more varied, rich and complex.”
Co-organiser Pradhan says: “Our aim is to have a mix of performance, academic exchange and information, but we will also initiate discussions that help bring together the independent music industry that has sprung up in India in the last decade or so, which addresses the needs of musicians and music lovers, whose interests and tastes are varied and not restricted to mainstream film music alone.”
Unusually for a music festival, Baajaa Gaajaa features lectures and seminars. Eminent scholars, Indian and foreign, came this time to speak on different forms of music. Linda Hess of the department of religious studies at Stanford University spoke on Bhakti poetry and music on the opening day, including the poetry of Kabir, focusing on how much the words matter to the singer. Yesterday Hiros Nakagawa, a Japanese student of Indian music theory at Banaras Hindu University, spoke on Japanese music. This evening, Adrian McNeil will speak on “The Enigma of Sourendra Mohan Tagore and his Orchestra”. Tagore, a member of the famous and culturally accomplished Tagore family was, among other things, a collector of hybrid and traditional musical instruments, and McNeil looks at his life through one such collection he dispatched to Melbourne in 1881.
Among the seminars were those on presenting Indian music abroad, on film-making and music, and on the state of patronage in Indian music.
Other highlights of this edition include an exhibition of classical stringed instruments by a family of seventh-generation instrument-makers from Maharashtra; “Stories in a Song: A Musical Collage of Theatre, Literature and History”, directed by Sunil Shanbag with music direction by Mudgal and Pradhan; and a performance by the percussion fusion band Circle of Rhythm, made up of drummers and percussionists Bobby Singh, Ben Walsh and Greg Shehen.
Tonight’s closing concert is “Neha Boliyaan”, with Hariharan on Urdu ghazal, nazm and allied forms, and Suresh Wadkar on Marathi ghazals and allied forms.
