Striking the write chord
Aparna Banerji

He is one of the finest connoisseurs of music that the world has ever known. Can tell bad music from good (and vice-versa) through the most impalpable of hints. As the introduction on the world music website (which he co-hosts with Petr Doruzka) aptly puts it, "Whether it was the music of Joseph Spence or Goro Yamaguchi, Martin Carthy or Ali Akbar Khan, the Grateful Dead or Viv Stanshall, Iva Bittová  or Artie Shaw, Shirley Collins or Martin Simpson, he believed that serious-minded music of whatever persuasion was something to be treated seriously..."

Ken Hunt takes pride in his forte and provides us with a delightful supply of witty and well-researched wrtings on musical works and artistes across the world. The Tribune catches up with him following the release of another fascinating project of his, the second volume of the third edition of The Rough Guide to World Music, covering Europe, Asia and Pacific, with an essay on the Harballabh Sangeet Sammelan.

Excerpts from an e-mail interview with the legend:

Indian music seems to ride high on your priority list. What drives your extraordinary understanding of and focus on it?

I come from a musical family. My paternal grandfather played stringed instruments such as the banjo-mandolin and mandolin. I still have his Neapolitan mandolin. His sons played semi-professionally. My father and uncle played the alto and tenor saxophone, could read staff notation...This is improvisation in a jazz sense. My father was a multi-instrumentalist. My mother played the violin but her heart was in dancing.

I began writing lyrics after my father’s death in 1995. That’s another journey. Like many people in the West, my introduction to Hindustani music came from Ravi Shankar. But what I heard initially wasn’t Panditji’s sitar or the melody of the raga, it was Alla Rakhaji playing the tabla and the tala. Find the one that takes you back home: that ‘simple’. After that, it was a matter of feeding my curiosity, curiosity fed by more and more discoveries. I was especially helped by interviewing Alla Rakhaji and Shivkumar Sharmaji early into my voyage of Indian discoveries. I credit them with giving me the wherewithal to explore with confidence. They flipped the lid off so much.

I once confessed to Vilayat Khansahib that I couldn’t get the interior logic of his raga Enayetkhani Kanada. I wasn’t stirring up trouble. I was puzzled. He knew that when I said I didn’t understand something, it was in the spirit of enquiry. Let’s be truthful, knowing we’ll never know what it’s all about is what it’s about. I, you, we know there is an infinity of discoveries out there waiting to be discovered. It’s like the joke I once cracked with Chitravina Ravikiran: it’s why we come back.

I flinch from the term ‘world music’ as it is currently understood. When Georg Capellen coined the term in 1906, Weltmusik (World Music) was looking elsewhere. All too frequently ‘world music’ just means somebody else’s pop music, something mishmash or borrowed from elsewhere. I always made and will always make choices musically. I invest huge amounts of time in India’s music but I draw a line at a lot of Indian pop music, that sort of Laxmikant-Pyarelel recycling over and over again. Mind you, their kind’s got the extraordinary potency of cheap perfume, Indian film music has a scent that arguably travels further than rock, reggae and rap. I wish I’d said that in print before.

Where do you think Harballabh fits in the scheme of things? How much does it matter in terms of importance on the global level?

I’m not sure if anything musical is important on a global level. But Harballabh is certainly important within its scheme of things. For one thing, it puts Punjab on the music conference calendar in an active rather than passive way. People forget the great things about Punjab’s contribution to Hindustani music. Most people are probably happier talking about K.L Saigal or Surinder Kaur.

I’m happier talking about Punjabi tabla playing or Bade Ghulam Ali Khan. But I still want to know how Davinder Singh and Ramanpreet Kaur develop on the tar shehnai and santoor. I guess I’m saying it’s good to remind the wider Indo-Pakistani population, and me, that classical music thrives in the northwest. I’m looking forward to when the festival presents the Wadali brothers. That’ll break new ground. Qawwali may make claims to be classical that people poo-poo but it is as fundamental to the Punjabi mindset as a wayside Durga mandir.

Does your book say anything on Punjabi music?

For many reasons, Punjabi music is dear to my heart. I hope it gets perceived as getting a fair crack of the whip, what with DJ Ritu covering Britain’s Punjabi expat scene—the likes of Malkit Singh, Heera and Achanak and beyond—and Jameela Siddiqi providing the chapter about Pakistan. I just sprinkle Punjabi fairy dust through several chapters. There could have been more Punjabi content, I concede. But you’d hear me saying something similar were I talking to the music correspondent of a newspaper based in Chennai or Jaipur or Kolkata or Mumbai.

Pop versions of bhangra and Punjabi music are known to the West but it knows very little about rustic Punjabi folk music, do you agree?

Statistically speaking, few people anywhere seem to know about folk music. Fewer still take an interest in folk music. What exactly is folk music? Get real, how many Punjabis have ever heard somebody like Sohan Nath playing the been, snake-charmer’s pipes, and made the connection about how the Rajasthani melody he’s playing arrived in Ludhiana where he lives? That’s the sort of link-the-dot-to-dot picture that keeps me going.

When, as a stranger, I went to our family’s ‘average’ pind in Punjab, within minutes a reception committee of folksingers with dhol or dholki accompaniment materialised out of thin air to welcome home kind strangers and their rupees. But when we drove cross-country by taxi to the pind or up north, the drivers certainly weren’t playing "rustic Punjabi folk music". They were always playing filmi sangeet, usually some inane Bollywood newie, or pumping out pop-bhangra. Not even filmi qawwali or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Much of the Punjabi bhangra was rather good. Regrettably for me, all the info on the cassettes was in Gurmukhi, otherwise I’d be sounding far cleverer to The Tribune’s readers. Sorry. Pop-bhangra, if I may call it that, began as a decidedly British-Asian experience. Channi Singh and Alaap, likewise Johnny Kalsi and the Dhol Foundation, for example, are British national treasures in my opinion. But for the sake of argument, let’s get readers to close their eyes and imagine they’re in Jalandhar or Chandigarh right now. I guarantee they’d have big problems easily tracking down the ‘real’ rustic Punjabi folk music or its idioms like bhangra, giddha or dafjan. But I’m happy for readers to disabuse me.

What were the major challenges encountered while collecting the playlists? Especially the folk and adivasi ones?

The playlists are a new feature in the third edition and because I’ve compiled commercially released CDs of Indian music for decades, it wasn’t too challenging. It came down to the usual issues of whittling and winnowing. With my Rough Guide to India CD anthology, no relation to the book, just a similarity of title, for World Music Network that’s coming out in early 2010, I programmed the music, devised artistic themes that run through the music and my notes and had to think about licensing issues. With the playlists, I just had to pick a particular number of tracks. Six to ten. I have a ‘library mind’ and the essence of being a librarian is knowing how and where to retrieve information. In a playlist, I don’t want to talk to the converted, I want to excite curiosity. When a rasika looks at a playlist, I still want to spring surprises. A bit like a Punjabi saying, "Bah, anybody could choose Amir Khansahib singing Marwa. Yesterday’s roti! But hang on, what’s a padam? And who’s Aruna Sairam?" Liken my selections to hooking innocents on the finest drugs ever. I’m only semi-joking. I want them!

In the case of the folk and adivasi selections, say, I wanted a Rajasthani musical virgin to listen to Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and Musicians Of Rajasthan playing their bhajan-like, cross-religion, cross-caste melange of folk and Hindustani classical music, Helo mharo suno, in Rajasthani it means ‘Hear me calling you’, and come away reeling. I wanted my imaginary listener to think, ‘That was so good. I need more like that!’ Compared to classical and film music, choosing the folk and adivasi material may sound like hard going but only if you’ve never heard anything from Shefali Bhushan’s Beat of India. Turbans off to Shefaliji and her team. There’s so much music out there waiting to be heard.

How and when were you exposed to Hindustani music for the first time?

Indian music crept up on me and became part of my musical diet before I realised it. It was sneaky and it was a private passion. What I knew about it was on the back of an LP cover. When I was a teenager, I discovered English folk music. The specialist shops that sold English folk music also sold Indian music. I would play truant from my grammar school in south London and visit one particular shop in the city. I was that fly on the wall at Collet’s. Who says truancy doesn’t pay? I listened to whatever the staff put on. I was indulged. Sometimes they’d ask what I wanted to listen to. Mostly I listened to what the staff, later my friends, played, whether that was music from the Bahamas, India or the southern English county of Sussex. And by 1975, I was somebody who was writing about music and by 1981 able to ask India’s finest pointed questions and getting remarkable answers confirmed I was on the right track. That’s why Pandit Ravi Shankar called me "unique" in his experience. I might ask him about Bengali music and parrot calls and unlock doors rather than him repeating the same old stuff. The key was I wanted to understand, if not as a musician at least as a musician’s son.

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