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Shahid Parvez - sitar
Akram Khan - tabla
Raga Bihag
1. Alap 16.06
2. Jod (jor) 10.42
3. Vilambit (slow) teental (16-beat cycle) 14.07
4. Gat in drut (fast) teental 11.05
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In Shahid Parvez's exposition of Bihag - a raga, the soul of which has been depicted as 'melancholy in the calm of the night, thirst for enjoyment' - he demonstrates not only his uncontested musicianship and his powers of extemporization but also the underlying, fundamental principle of Hindustani (Northern Indian) classical music. For any soloist of any standing, merely replicating past achievements by past masters of the sitar (or whatever other instrument) spells an admission of failure. He belongs to a tradition of improvised music within a musical system that demands spontaneous creativity in composition and the need to breathe new life into old forms. No raga's interpretation should stray from its strictly delineated bounds, its melody contoured with set ascending and descending melodic patterns. Rhythm and tempo complete the 'picture'. (And many ragas have visual representations and interpretations in the form of ragamala paintings; in the case of Bihag, historically a complicated, transferred one.) For a musician-composer such as Shahid Parvez the watchword must remain continuity in change; change in continuity. His performance here reflects that simple-to-say but harder-to-achieve mantra.
Now in his fifties Shahid Parvez is a senior Hindustani musician of the Twenty-first Century CE. He has chosen an innovative path, for example, recording with the female tabla player Anuradha Pal and recording a jugalbandi (duet) with the vocalist Rashid Khan. He comes with pedigree and trailing clouds of glory. Born into one of the Indian subcontinent's foremost, most illustrious and most influential musical dynasties, his father, with whom he began his training, was the maestro Aziz Khan, himself the younger brother of Inayat Khan and grandson of Wahid Khan of the Imdadkhani gharana (school or style of music-making with a trackable lineage), also known as the Etawah gharana. The nephew in Shahid Parvez embraces an extended family that includes such luminaries as Vilayat Khan and Imrat Khan. Sitar and surbahar (the deeper voiced member of the sitar family of instruments) figure prominently in the family lineage. He is, as it were, a chip off a constantly reshaped, continually regenerated block. That means he plays within a specific style of performance. In his case the gharana is renowned for an instrumental approach known as gayaki ang (singing style) in which the human voice is 'expressed' instrumentally.
Shahid Parvez's Bihag follows a standard performance pattern. It opens the alap, a leisurely but sensitive probing of the raga's character designed to bare the raga's heart not so much surgically (as can happen) as emotionally. An unmetered movement follows, in which rhythm is suggested rather than explicitly stated. Akram Khan joining in on tabla announces the next stage with a vilambit laya (slow-tempo) delivery set in teental - the versatile and popular 16-beat taal (rhythm cycle) that breaks down as 4+4+4+4. The performance concludes with a gat - a composition based on a musical leitmotiv or figure - framed in the same rhythm cycle, in this case a drut (fast-tempo) teental.
Notes: Ken Hunt
Ken Hunt is a full-time, freelance writer, broadcaster and translator. His writing appears in reference works for the All Music Guides, Oxford University Press, Penguin/Viking and the Rough Guides, in numerous periodicals and journals, in concert and festival programmes, and all over the internet.
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