GAJENDRA PURI GOSWAMI
THE IMMORTAL SOUND OF
SHAKTI
In 1976, three Indians and a Britisher entered South Hampton
College in Long Island to perform a musical show. The
performance, originally recorded by the artists only for
personalised mementos, was picked up by CBS Recordings and
released a few months later, leading to the unexpected birth of
one of the greatest Indian bands of all time. The four cohorts
were Zakir Hussain, violin virtuoso L. Shankar, Ghatam player
Pandit Vikku Vinayakram, and John Mclaughlin, together
known as Shakti. 45 years later, neither the band nor some
of its members exist, but what remains transcribed in their
recordings, are remnants of timeless music. Although Shakti
didn’t sell as many records, it earned the reputation as the
trailblazer of world music genre- the first band to bridge the
gap between western and eastern classical music worldwide
and colligating the two schools of classical music- Hindustani
and Carnatic- wit hin India.John Mclaughlin’s union with
India had begun long before he met Zakir Hussain at a music
storein Greenwich Village, England in 1973. After receding
from his critically acclaimed band The Mahavishnu Orchestra,
the musician was learning veena and practising yoga with
his spiritual guru Sri Chinmoy. It was during this time that
he met Zakir Hussain and the duo immediately developed a
mutual likening and respect for each other’s music. But, little
did the guitarist know that his tryst with the table player would
lead to the crossover of world music traditions. The duoalong
with L. Shankar and mridangam player Ramnad Raghvan
extensively toured Europe between 1975- 1978. After 1978, the
band ebbed into obscurity until the its reinvention in 1997 as
Remember Shakti. Before Shakti, an east-west fusion band
was practically unheard of. The band exhibited an incessant
stream of highly complex but melodious harmonies in their
music. The instruments used by Shakti were as perplex as
their music seemed at the time. The acoustic “Shakti guitar”
that Mclaughlin used had added strings across the guitar hole
to create an extended sound simulating a sitar. In ‘Remember
Shakti’, late mandolin player U.Srinivas used a self-designed
electric Mandolin with an extra 5th string for deeper bass tones
than a regular mandolin, to pick a prolonged note like the veena
. Shakti also played a part in making Carnatic instruments such
as the ‘ghatam’ popular among the western audiences. Each
member of the ensemble had a distinguished role to play. While
L. Shankar exhibited swiftness on the violin, Mclaughlin did the
improvisation, as Hussain and Raghvan’s riveting percussion
duel left the audience spellbound. The percussion duel looked
after the rhythms, whereas Mclaughlin and L.Shankar were
in charge of the melodic sessions. Remember Shakti, a more
evolved form of Shakti, was a starkly reinvented band of the
original band. For the first time, Shakti incorporated vocals in
their music. Featuring vocalist Shankar Mahadevan and T.H
Vikku’s son Selvaganesh, the band added Konokal- a Carnatic
musical system of rhythm- to its vast ambit of music. Not only
did Remember Shakti swelled in popularity, it lasted longer than
its predecessor and toured more extensively featuring many
moreversatile musicians such as legendary flutist Hariprasad
Chaurasiya and santoor player Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma, who
self-composed and played the song ‘Shringar’- a twenty-four-
minute-long serene subliminal track from the ‘Saturday Night
in Bombay’ album.
Shakti pioneered a whole new genre of music which inspired
generation of forthcoming musicians such as the likes of Louiz
Banks, Sanjay Divecha, Karsh Kale, slide guitarist Prakash
Sontakke, Flutist Rajeev Raja, drummer Ranjit Barot, Vikku
Selvaganesh, and many more worldwide. While the band’s
connoisseurs still produce timeless music as they did in the 70’s,
Shakti perished with the untimely demise of late U. Srinivas in
2015. Their music, however, is still considered timeless and has
survived the everlasting passage of time.
The
Score Magazine
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