Baul

I cannot claim myself to be any expert on Baul songs. I have heard my share of Baul songs, mostly from radio. However, I have been fortunate to have two coincidences working for me in this respect. First, I like wrtings of Sudhir Chakrabarti. He was a professor of Bengali, but his passion was Bangla songs. Though he started writing rather late, he has been relentless in churning out articles since he started writing popular articles with seriousness. These articles are not just nonsensical pot-boilers. There are goods and bads, but none is insignificant. Sudhirbabu's other passion is Bengali Folk culture. I think I have painted the description of the passion with too broad a brush, but could not find a better description than this. He doesn't do it as a paid occupation. It's his labor of love. I don't know whether he follows the right research methodologies or not. But I could not care less. His research produced books like ব্রাত্য-লোকায়ত লালন (Bratyo Lokayoto Lalon), বাউল ফকির কথা (Baul Phakir Katha). Through these books and other writings of Sudhirbabu I got interested in the Baul way of life, and especially the Baul songs, though I learned that Baul songs are part of the Baul way of life. Without understanding or experiencing the Baul way of life one can neither appreciate nor fathom the Baul songs.

My other, and possibly bigger, influence for Baul songs is my friend Sudipto Chatterjee. Sudipto teaches and works in theater and performace stidues. But he picked up a penchant for Lalon Shah pretty early on. I remember the day when I first met him, about fifteen years ago, he boasted that he had already collected all Lalon songs. Only later I could understand his pride in that posession. He (and Theater director Sumon Mukhopadhyay) travelled to Kushthita, Lalon's birth and workplace, in Bangladesh in 1997. The materials they collected there, and since then, finally bore fruit in the form of a Perfomance called "The Man Of The Heart". A performance on Lalon's life and work, writtent and performed by Sudipto and directed by Sumon. I have heard numerous Lalon songs from Sudipto, along with stories, anecdotes and explanations. I heard about Panju Shah, Duddu Shah first through him. These, Sudhirbabu's books, gave me a better idea about the journey of Baul culture through history, both social and political. In most case, these two were intermingled intimately.

Later, thorugh a Bangla folk band called দোহার (Dohar), I first heard Abdul Karim's song. And I was bowled over immediately. Later I tried to dig up information from the web about Abdul Karim, who uses Baul Abdul Karim as his bhonita in some songs. There is not alot of information about him on the web, at least not as much to satisfy my curiosity. However, I came to know that he is still alive and well, though he is over 90 years of age. He still writes songs. But he has already become an institution in Bangladesh. I could not figure out whether he leads a strict Baul life. But that does not matter to me at his point. You can check out some of his songs in Youtube by searching on his name.

Ain’t No Luddite

I am not an adopter. I don't work to stay ahead of the technology curve. Rather, I fall quite far back in that curve to see all my friends and most of my family and acquaintances pass by me and my wife. But the truth is that I am quite happy and content being a follower. I keep my OS at least one version behind the latest and the greatest. Currently, even though my sparingly-used Windows machine runs XP (used only for music production since I have already invested money and learning-time on software that runs only on Windows), I have the latest OS version (Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10) on my primary home machine. I resisted having a cell phone for quite some time before finally jumping on the bandwagon in 2003. Even then I have pretty basic cell phone which is used as a - surprise! surprise! - phone to call people. No blackberry, no iPhone, no Android, no nothing. We don't have a LCD or Plasma TV, mostly because we don't need it. We don't watch TV or movies that much. 90% of time, our TV is playing either Baby Einstein DVD or PBS Kids show. Our DVD player is a $25 Coby. My home theater is a 8-year old system. My Bose Acoustimass speakers are sitting comfortably in the closet, gathering dust. Five-and-half-years since we have moved into this house, I didn't get energy, urge or serious nudge from Paramita to hook those on. On the social networking side, I have got onto Orkut after a having a dormant account for quite a while, thanks to Paramita for finally making me active there. But that's been almost one-and-half years. By that time most of my friends there have moved on to the greener pasture of Facebook. I have too. But only recently. And I am still trying to figure things out there. Now I see people are using Twitter. I guess, it will take me at least an year or two before I get on to Twitter.

The reason I started this post is, I think the best thing that have happened in last two years on the Technology side, as far as I am concerned, is Pandora. It's really awesome. Those who haven't yet found Pandora: it's a Music Genome Project. The site says:

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.

So the idea is that you start with one of your favorite songs. Then based on the musical attributes of the song, Pandora will select other songs. For each song, you can tell Pandora whether you like this song or not, thereby 'training' Pandora to your taste. You can create 'Radio Stations' based upon this song. A 'Radio Station' can be created by Artist or by Genre too. There is a cool feature called Quick Mix, which is basically a random play of songs from Station you have selected.

It's really easier to experience and experimet with Pandora than explain how it works. You need a registration for creating Stations. But registration is free and require very little information. However, there is one caveat. The service is only for North American audience. I understand that is due to some licensing issue. If you are in North Americal (or have an North American IP address ... wink wink), go there and have some wonderful musical experience.

Tin Pahaarer Gaan

I came across Birendra Chattopadhyay's work when, I believe, I was in high school or in first year of college. My impressionable mind immediately fell in love with his work. He was never a mainstream poet. But his poetry borne a unique and strong voice which I seldom found in others. Around the same time I found a cassette published by School of People's Art which contained songs and recitation of Birendra Chattopadhyay's poems. The songs were created out of his poems by Binoy Chakrabarty. He did and excellent job. Together with the poems and this cassette, Birendra Chattopadhyay made a lasting impression.





I loved a long poem called 'Tin Pahaarer Gaan' literally "The song of Three Mountains" or "The song of a mountain called Tin Pahaar". I starts with 'Pahariya madhupur metho dhulipoth' and continues to give a vivid and wonderful imagery. Around that time I also started composing songs. So I put tune to it - not tothe whole poem though. I stopped when I thought was the right moment for a song to stop. This was 1988-89. I kept it to myself and never published it. In 2007 I arranged it. This is that song.

Song puzzles

I have some old recordings in my possession. Old means really old - at least fifty years or more. I have a cousin, who is a professional Audio Engineer with a big studio in India. But his passion is music from a very very tender age. As they say, he lives for music. When he was a student, he used to roam around in Kolkata to collect old records. I guess these recordings came from those ventures. These are recorded from noisy 78 RPM disks. I haven't tried to cleanup the recordings. I have noticed in my earlier attempts of cleaning that unless one has lots of time and really good tools, it's better to leave the noise. Incompetent noise-reduction kills the song more than the noise does.

Move over to my Music Broadcast page and listen to the Recognize the singers section. If you can recognize them before I publish the name, drop me a line.