NCPA@home – Ajoy Chakrabarty

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMh8adW4f_c

Duration: 1 Hr 32 Minutes
Supporting artistes: Bhawani Shankar (pakhawaj) Indranil Bhaduri (tabla) Shubhayu Sen Majumdar (esraj) Shobhun Mukherjee (keyboard) Buddhadev Ganguly (guitar)

This event was staged at the Tata Theatre on July 19, 2014 as a part of NCPA’s 3-day annual festival titled Bandish: Celebrating the Legendary Composers.

Ethnic yet contemporary, the euphoric genre of music created by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) attempted to graft traditional folk and devotional genres onto the classical forms of Hindustani music. The most prominent characteristic of his compositions is indeed the intimate union of music and words, focusing more on sounds, rhythms and texture of words than on music itself. The corpus of over two thousand songs included a wide variety of genres. The tunes were rather simple, direct and devoid of elaborate ornamentation; often couched in common Hindustani ragas as well as brilliant hybrid melodies arising from mixing of two or more ragas, and sometimes even borrowing from traditional Scottish, Irish and old English tunes. The rhythmic structures (talas) too were quite simple. The rich lyrics in Bangla dealt with myriad subjects: prayers, sorrow, joy, love and longing, Nature, Universe, the motherland and so on. Ajoy Chakrabarty has had the privilege of training with several teachers including the legendary maestro Jnan Prakash Ghosh. He also trained with Munawar Ali Khan, son and disciple of Bade Ghulam Ali Khan of Patiala gharana. With an astounding control over voice and command over diverse genres such as khayal, thumri and Rabindra sangeet, Ajoy Chakrabarty is acclaimed as an outstanding vocalist today. Ajoy Chakrabarty presents select compositions of Rabindranath Tagore, ranging from dhrupad, thumri and geet, to tappa and keertan.

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