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Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia has been called by Western music commentators as flute’s Fredrik Chopin. He has been so popular that the tranquil soothing tone of his flute can now be called The Chaurasia Sound

Music

SIDE 1

SRISHTI

The record is divided into two themes; one side is called Srishti and is properly the first side and the second is called Mukti. Creation and liberation, the two sides of the same coin of existence. Srishti opens with the undifferentiated sound of silence; the kind of silence that must fill the interstellar space. From this silence emerges softly, hardly audible, the call of the flute – steady as life’s own unremitting breath, long seamless, epochal. Then little birdlike stirrings break the surface of this expanse of empty sound and divide it. Divisions like here and there, above and below begin to arise. At last the listener feels secure in this promise of a return to his familiar relative world of big and small, yesterday and today, and of assured succession. The flute enters fondling the notes of a scale that slowly forms into the semblance of an unrecognizable Raga whose contours tirelessly change. It forms eddies of sound that hovers on the brink of meaning, for, as yet there is no rhythm, no Tala, no recurrence at the same point of ending. The notes begin to take shape and in the form of a folk tune with no time incorporated in it to differentiate its sections. Slowly, beyond the silence the Tabla emerges lurking like a pulse beat in the gaps of the tune, and there is a diastole and systole of radiance opening into flat meadows of notes.

SIDE 2

MUKTI

On Mukti side the resolutions are firm, there is no Tala yet, but the tune has firmed into Pahadi Raga and the Laya is that of Jor spaciously arranged accent linking accent in a rush of tangled iambics. As the theme unfolds, the background of guitar strings brings in our contemporary age, suggesting neurotic movement contrasting the quiet tranquil gallop of the Tala, steady like a ship on a calm sea. Every resolution thereafter is somehow sad, but strangely consoling. It is a man’s endless search for a holy grail in life, the pilgrim in search of his own immortal self. It is at this stage that the flute’s rich tapestry of interlocking phrases turns into a blazing Diwali of notes symbolic of the awakening that is at the end of all search.

This disc is a pleasure and a challenge to hear. Listen to it with the lights off; in the darkness and its meaning expands each time embracing new possibilities and opening other vistas.

-       Raghava R. Menon

Artists:

Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia (Flute)

Tracks: