Tamil Festival Music

We arrived in Munnar on December 23rd to find the hotels full.  It was the Christmas period and the Indian middle class were on holiday. We'd met a family from Assam on the train from Madurai, spending a couple of weeks touring a mix of holy and secular attractions. Arriving in the mountains we discovered that hill stations were particularly favoured by Indians for short breaks. Most were from other parts of Kerala and neighbouring Karnataka.  Had the border with Tamil Nadu not been closed because of the dam dispute, we may not have found a room at all.

I spent the night in the worst room I can remember, right off reception and with a damp, smelly en-suite and a window with a view of a brick wall less than three feet away.  The manager and the sweeper, an old smoker, slept on the floor of reception. Somehow, this being India, it felt perfectly natural and as a by-product the 10.30 curfew was rigidly enforced.  The most memorable sound was that of the sweeper coughing, hawking and spitting at regular intervals through the night.

On Christmas Eve, while our bags were moved to a better room (in fact the best in the hotel had become available), we went out on a set tour. Exhaustion had allowed the manager to talk us into taking a Jeep tour with his friend, Rajeesh.  This was very pleasant, and took in tiger and elephant hunting (with cameras).  We saw neither but the fresh elephant dung was particularly impressive.

We were well behind schedule on the return journey and Rajeesh, who had been taking a leisurely pace, sped up in response to a phone call.  So I was surprised when, two minutes from the hotel, he pulled over.
"Would you like to see this?" he asked.

'This' was a patch of waste ground and people standing around a fire.  It was cold in the Jeep - the temperature had plummeted when the sun went down - and the fire was attractive. Rajeesh killed the engine and then I heard music.  We walked closer and saw a band of three drummers and two horn players, a priest/MC, a sadhu (holy man), three men doing something with fire and a group of women dancing in a manner I associate with sub-Saharan Africa. ( They did not come across as demur Hindu women.)  And around them all was a small crowd.

We had happened on a ceremony of some kind and I quickly decided not to take our my camera.  This was partly to avoid causing offence but mostly because the sound was so amazing I wanted to record some.  In my back-pack was my handy Zoom H4 and the clip contains that audio. The way the rhythm shifts back and forth is of particular interest. (You may want to roll off the bass a little.)

I would have liked to have stayed longer than the 21 hours I spent in the spectacular temple city of Madurai.  A number of factors, including a dispute between the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu over a dam, made us get on a train to Trivandrum in the small hours.

Another British cock-up, although not on the scale of Partition, is reverberating down the centuries.  In the late 19th century the British oversaw the building of a dam in the kingdom of Travancore (modern day Kerala) for the irrigation of the lands to the east of the Western Ghats (then the Madras Presidency, now Tamil Nadu).  The Mullaperiyar was bequeathed to Madras for a thousand years. In a nutshell, the Keralans think the dam is in need of repair but don't want to pay for it as it's not their dam and they don't benefit from it.  The Tamils believe the dam is in good condition and don't want to pay for unnecessary repairs.  Obviously, a burst dam would be catastrophic for the Keralans and things have become rather heated.  There have been border skirmishes and all the roads were closed.  The only way in and out was by train.


I took a picture of this intriguing machine but had no time to enquire further.  Since I've returned I found clip on Youtube (where else?) featuring a demonstration. Predictably, but wonderfully, there are a number of similar clips.

The first lesson

When I bought my flute from Vunugoptal I tried to teach him a tune and he tried to teach one to me.  Neither of us had much success.  I had wanted to play The Lark in the Morning - a particular favourite - but could neither remember it nor conjure it out of the Keralan air.  I settled for The Maids of Mitchelstown.

I don't know what tune he tried to teach me but I distracted myself by trying to mimic the sighing quality of his playing.  I was taught to cover the holes of the flute with the pads the last phalange of each finger.  This is a very western, classical style of playing but it makes impossible the kind of glissando that Venugoptal achieved with such grace and lack of effort.  He did this by using the pads under the second phalange of the fingers on his right hand.

I was also confused by the fact that he took his root note from the middle of the instrument - the top three holes being open, the bottom three closed.  He maintained that his flute was in C while to my mind it was in G.  This caused me some problems in our next meeting, my first 'formal' lesson.

Venugoptal's teaching involved me learning and transcribing tunes.  The first one uses a scale:

D Eb F# G A Bb C# D

Just to give you a sense of my own confusion, the first note of lines 3 and 4 of the transcription should be a G, the second F# etc. Venugopal demonstrates the tune in the clip. His playing is rather stilted but he wouldn't let me record him just 'playing', only demonstrating the tunes. The accompanying pictures are completely gratuitous but I haven't found a way of posting audio without pictures. My apologies for the noise caused wind hitting the microphone - we were outside.

The Keralan flute bag

On the way to my first Dravidian flute lesson I was hailed by the tailor whose hut, a corrugated iron-roofed structure with a view out over the Arabian Sea, was en route to the Juice Shack where I had first met Venugoptal.  I had visited him the previous afternoon to choose material and have my flute measured for a bag.  I had arranged to collect it later in the day but, although it would make me late, I responded to the tailor's enthusiasm in the only way I could.  The bag wasn't quite finished so I watched the final stages and specified the length of the draw-string while the proprietor tried hard to persuade me to have some shirts made - a sure sign I had paid too much for the bag.

I hadn't haggled on this occasion for two reasons.  Firstly, the man had refused to budge on the cost of a dress one of my daughters was keen on but didn't buy.  And secondly, I had recently read the story of V.S. Naipaul and the cobbler in 'An Area of Darkness'.

The author had a pair of shoes in need of some stitching and took them to a cobbler in Bombay.  He haggled aggressively over the cost of the repair and beat the man down to a very low price.  The cobbler took one of the shoes, picked up a four inch nail and promptly drove it through the sole with a hammer. He only returned the shoe with a struggle.  I wanted the tailor to make me a quality product.

In the end the bag was certainly fit for purpose, although I think my presence distracted him and he let his machine get the better of him.  There are a number of unnecessary black stitches near the mouth.

When I explained the delay to my teacher, the first thing he asked was the price I had paid for the bag.
"One hundred and eighty rupees," I said. (About £2.25 sterling)
"Ah," he replied. "You should not have paid more than a hundred rupees for a bag like this."
I immediately thought about the sum I had paid him for the flute.

However, he assured me the bag was a good idea, and not for the reasons I had supposed.  Apparently he had twice been bitten on the lips by insects that had crawled into the warm, damp, dark space inside his flute.  The creatures had taken exception when he put the instrument to his lips to blow and inflicted an injury that made it impossible to play for a couple of days, such was the swelling of his lip. This is  not a problem I have ever experienced in the UK.

And then we went up the rickety stairs to the covered part of the juice bar and got down to musical business.

The Dravidian Flute, continued

There was no way of knowing the going rate for a hand-made flute in Kerala. I just had to go on Venugopal's open-hearted demeanour.  I believed him when he said he didn't really care whether or not he sold a particular flute to a particular customer.  Anyone who has visited a bazaar in the 'developing world' and shown even the most cursory interest in an item has probably, also, been pursued down the street with ever decreasing prices. This was one vendor who wasn't about to do that.

Venugopal's flute is in the foreground

Apparently he sources his bamboo from tribesmen who live in the forest miles from any roads.  He leaves his motorbike at the edge of the forest, walks to where they live, and then spends two or three days with them during which they show him the best plants. He told me this towards the end of my second, and final, lesson, not as part of the sales pitch.  The bamboo is stronger than my previous flutes.  It is not as thick as either of my shakuhachis but is of a different variety.  I have a shakuhachi in F, less than two inches longer than Venugopal's flute (fundamental G).  The shakuhaci has five 'segments' whereas the Indian flute has only one.

Venugopal insisted the flute was in C and it took me a while to realise that he takes the tuning from the middle, where only the thumb hole and the upper three finger holes are closed.  This note is indeed C, but produces a Lydian mode if a scale is based on it.  The lowest note is G and this produces G major if no half holing takes place.

And the term 'half-holing' also caused some confusion when I used it in relation to producing semitones, as the amount of hole uncovered to produce them is rarely half.

We concluded the deal, played a bit for each other and posed for the photo, below. It was only a day or two later that it occurred me to seek him out and have a lesson or two in South Indian flute technique.  

The Dravidian flute

We left Fort Cochin by taking the ferry across to Ernakulam.  From there we took a train south to Varkala, a small town with an important Hindu shrine on the coast, just a short rickshaw ride from the station. The temple and shrines are about 300 metres from the beach.  At the beach itself the devout spread the ashes of the deceased and then return in subsequent years to do puja (prayer/ceremony).  To facilitate this, the Brahmins create altars from the sand on the beach.

The real action at this beach takes place at dawn and immediately afterwards.  (Still rather jet lagged it was a few days before I discovered this.)  A mere 50 metres north of this beach, and separated only by easily negotiated rocks, is the tourist beach.  This is populated predominantly by sunbathing westerners in trunks or bikinis. The Indians would also visit,  taking to the waters of the Arabian Sea fully clothed, as is their custom.  

On the cliff above this beach are the small, low rise hotels (ours boasted four rooms) and makeshift restaurants.  The access to these is by a footpath wide enough for delivery rickshaw but little else.  The taxis and other rickshaws deposited their human cargoes at the car park at the end of the cliff path. I enjoyed the respite from car horns, the unrelenting soundscape of roads throughout the subcontinent, and could listen to the mynah birds and the waves.

After a few days I saw a man put a bamboo flute to his lips and begin to play. It was the first live flute I had heard since arriving and I was immediately entranced.  My previous trip had been to the north and, early on, I had bought a flute for a few rupees that sustained me during my six week stay. So far, this time all I had seen were some insubstantial, overpriced 'souvenir' instruments and I was hoping to find something rather better. Now flute man demonstrated some flutes and was happy to let me try some.

He had bigger ones in G and smaller ones in C.  My technique at the time was just as I would use on the recorder, using the pads of the final section of each finger to close the holes.  This made it very difficult to close the holes on the G flutes so I gravitated towards the C instruments.  The intonation was true, at least relative to the instrument.  And the musician, who was also the maker, surprised me by taking an electronic tuner out of his bag to validate the tuning.

Now buying things in India is not like it is in England where, unless it's a second hand car, one tends to accept the initial price.  In India some things are 'fixed price' while others, especially from stalls or independent traders, are negotiable. For the flute I had taken a fancy to, Venugopal would usually (he said) charge 2,000 rupees - about £25.  In India this is an enormous sum - our hotel rooms, doubles, were costing us £3.50 a night each.  For me, because he recognised me as a musician, he was prepared to let it go for 1,500 rupees.

So was he just flattering me? Was this a good price? Was I going to let the tourist's constant fear of being ripped off come between me and a fine instrument?  I have just found a clip of Venugopal on Youtube that makes me think that although compliments came easily to him, he may have been pleased that one of his flutes might go to someone who could play it straight off.

Kathakali in Kochi

I have recently returned from India; a fortnight or so in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. It was a family visit so perhaps not as much music as I might have otherwise have pursued but nevertheless I encountered plenty.

I left home in Norwich in the small hours on the back of a jazz gig over in Great Yarmouth. I arrived in Cochin at the end of a particularly long day at about 5.30am, local time.  Having been advised to stay awake until local bedtime, that first day is a bit of a blur.  However, our host at the homestay suggested we go and see a Kathakali performance that evening.  Although watching the performers apply their make-up was fascinating (it took them over an hour) and the live drumming and percussion was a treat, I confess I kept nodding off during the dancing as I struggled against loss of sleep.

I was a better audience for a sitar and tabla recital in the same venue the following evening but I couldn't persuade the rest of my party to come along.