May 9, 2013 Music
Some Music for You Today – May 9th, 2013
“Yesterdays” by Jerome Kern (with lyrics by Otto Harbach) This version performed by Vijaya Sundaram and Warren Senders in 1989.
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Yulduz Usmanova (Usmonova) is a well-known Uzbeki singer. I thought you’d enjoy listening to her beautiful singing.
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Eddie Jefferson sings “Sister Sadie.”
I love Mr. Jefferson’s warm, fuzzy vocals. There’s humor and great musicality in all his singing. He generally makes me smile. (Although, I must say this song isn’t funny).
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Billie Holiday: I Cover The Waterfront
She always makes me want to cry.
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The above piece is a composition by Warren Senders, who put Baul songs to music. The lead singer in this live concert recording from 1993 song is me (yes, I used to be a part of a group of women singers known as “Goddess Gospel” — founded and led by Louise Cloutier, formerly of Cambridge, now in Chicago). Hope you enjoy Three Baul Songs!
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One of my favorite pieces of guitar playing: Bach Cello Suite #1 in G, played by Andres Segovia.
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Otis Redding — “These Arms of Mine”
I love Otis Redding!
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Ray Charles — “Georgia On My Mind”
There’s nobody like Ray!
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Bob Dylan — It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
Then, there’s Bob!
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“Julia” by The Beatles (John Lennon)
This, too, makes me want to cry.
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And of course, there’s Hindustani (North Indian) Classical Vocal Music. Hope you enjoy Ashwini Bhide Deshpande singing Raga Bhimpalasi.
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Song from the movie “Alaipayuthey” — music by A.R. Rahman
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Another song from the movie “Alaipayuthey” — music by A.R. Rahman. This one is one of my absolute favorite A.R. Rahman songs.
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“Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” is one of my favorite pieces by Charles Mingus. I used to sing a version of it (lovely lyrics!).
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That’s it for today, folks. I’m still feeling a little shy about putting up my very own songs and compositions, but will do so anon. Hope you enjoyed the music!
Tags: #Vijaya Sundaram, #Warren Senders, Alaipayuthey songs, Andres Segovia, Antigravity, Ashwini Bhide Deshpande, Bob Dylan, Charles Mingus, Jerome Kern, Otis Redding, Ray Charles, Yulduz Usmanova, Yulduz Usmonova
Mar 28, 2013 Blogs and Bloggers, Essays on Music and Musicians
Weaving Time – Original Composition by Warren Senders, 1994. Performed by Antigravity, in Pune, India, in 1994 at Ishvani Kendra Studios
When We Wove a Tapestry — A Reminiscence
©By Vijaya Sundaram
March 28th, 2013
The beautiful composition on the mp3 attachment above is by Warren Senders (photo, center), and it is one of my all-time favorite compositions (and I love all of his music).
We had a lovely time at Ishvani Kendra, in Pune in 1994, towards the end of our year-long stay that year. Every day, we would get there in the morning, and most days, we’d be out at twilight. We’d sit there and play our hearts out, recording take after take. That was a kind of meditation in itself.
Then, after a particularly intense session or two, we would emerge into the heat of the afternoon, just to breathe air that wasn’t musky with concentration. The intensely bright haze of noon would glow gold and red in our eyes, and the beautiful flowering bougainvillea plants vied with each other to create a psychedelic feast of color.
It was truly a marriage of true minds for all of us during that week or so at Ishvani Kendra. All of us loved each other, because our language was that of music — we understood each other perfectly. We practised and recorded Warren’s compositions. We practised and recorded mine. I had been nervous, because I wasn’t sure whether the older gentlemen in the group would accept my direction after having been used to my being their colleague, not the composer/director. I should have known better. There was no question of ego. They gave their best and utmost love and attention to the music composed by Warren and to my music. It was pure and Apollonian. I had never been happier.
This was the context: Warren and I had taken a year off from our lives in the U.S. to go to India for the sole purpose of studying music, and composing / recording our original pieces. Our practice, in general, was to live carefully, save up money for two years and go to India to live for one year. We did it only twice – and the first time we went back to India for a whole year, we didn’t need to save that much, because Warren was awarded an AIIS (American Institute of Indian Studies) scholarship, which lasted us for that year.
Independent of each other, we composed several pieces that year (mine are on DAT tapes, and are not yet uploaded to this computer, so I’m putting up Warren’s compositions. I promise to do some blog posts which include mine. I hope you enjoy them).
During that year, which was pretty intense, we took Hindustani classical vocal lessons with our Guruji, the late Pt. Shreeram G. Devasthali. By afternoon, evening and night, we’d compose or practise, take walks, prepare dinner or go out to dinner, and then practise again. Most evenings, we’d hang out with our musician friends, and we were as one being. On weekends, we’d visit my grandparents and aunt, and also go for concerts.
In short, that was an idyllic year — for the most part. Like any other year, it also had its frustrations — for example, we searched high and low for a drummer, and finally, towards the end of the year, came across a gem of a player, Nikhil Sohoni, and everyone heaved a sigh of relief. There were also unaccountable periods of sadness for me for a few months, early in the year, and I revived only when I did music. I don’t dwell on those as much as on the long, long periods of beautiful music-making, which we did with our teacher, and with our friends in the group which Warren had named and founded years ago: Antigravity.
Before this Antigravity, Warren had formed the American Antigravity in the 1970s, and that group was dynamic, with Phil Scarff on saxophones, Bob Pilkington on trombone, Tom MacDonald on drums, Dee Wood on guitar and Warren on bass.
When Warren had first come to India (to study Hindustani classical vocal music) on an Indo-American Fellowship in 1985, he set about forming his Indian chapter of Antigravity. Although some of the personnel had changed over the years, the core group consisted of the following people since 1986: Ramakant Paranjape, violin; and Ajit Soman (now late), flute; Warren Senders, bass; then, along came Rajeev Devasthali, tabla, then Atul Keskar, dilruba and sitar, and finally, yours truly on guitar. Nikhil Sohoni (percussion) was new to us in the year 1994. As new to the group as him was our friend Caroline Dillon, cellist (missing from the group photograph) — she had had to fly back to the U.S. after her three-month stay in India.
Back to Ishvani Kendra and our insanely long recording sessions. We recorded and practised, ate, chatted, drank endless cups of tea and coffee, laughed, got frustrated at times, laughed again, practised with redoubled concentration, and gave our hearts to the music, which was complex, demanding, difficult and brilliant.
The result? Warren Senders’ CD: Boogie For Hanuman.
Another result? My cassette tape (we didn’t have enough capital for two CD productions that year): Magic Realism.
I look back on that year, and feel a sense of accomplishment. We came back to the U.S. at the start of 1995, and began our work lives again. We also did radio shows (WGHB, Emerson Radio, WBUR, etc.), plus performances of Indian classical vocal music together. We gave concerts with the American Antigravity which featured our own compositions as well.
As the song goes, It was a very good year.
And the time that we wove into it became a beautiful tapestry into which all our lives were woven, a tapestry in which our spirits and imaginations made intricate patterns, and through those complex patterns, love glowed in the music.
I hope you enjoy it!
Thanks for listening!
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P.S. Once I upload my own music, I’ll do similar posts for my pieces. Hope you enjoy them!
Tags: #Music, Antigravity, Indo-Jazz Synthesis, Ishvani Kendra, Original Composition by Warren Senders, Recording sessions, Reminiscences about Pune
Mar 17, 2013 Awake in Dream Time - Journal Entries about the almost real, the surreal and the unreal, Essays on Music and Musicians
Roots Music
(Pune, India, 1994) – An Original Poem
©Vijaya Sundaram, March 17th, 2013
To get to the roots of things,
We dug deep, drenched in song.
At times, things were rich,
Saturated, awash in light.
At others, rocks shouldered through,
Got wrenched out of the way.
That was the year when
Unexplained sorrow burst
Through inexplicable joy,
Escaped, became song.
Sometimes dreams came,
Pursued by demons,
Effaced by the gods.
That was a good year,
Full of magic realism, when
Dreams came on winged backs
And bore me away, and
A three-faced Goddess
Showed me favor,
As I ran, carrying a fish in a jug.
That was the year to rise,
Untrammelled by the mundane.
Above the struggle, we leaped
Into a space of pure spirit.
That was the year we distilled
Our music-minds, mined the ether.
That was the year, when,
Lighter than air, lighter than light,
We rose, embryonic-winged
For we were ruled by spirit,
And our spirits were weightless.
~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tags: #Music, #Original Poetry, #Vijaya Sundaram, #Warren Senders, Antigravity, India, Pune
Mar 3, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Teaching and Learning
Curiously, it didn’t hurt. It didn’t do much of anything, except to create a sense of dull satisfaction: Yup. I knew my poems didn’t suit their needs, but I sent them off anyway.
Realism, thy name is DreamersOfDreams.
It must be because I’m almost forty-nine — the almost part is crucial.
It must be because I know how long a struggle all this is for most writers. That’s why, I guess, they send stuff off when they’re in their twenties.
I didn’t do that in my twenties. I was too busy struggling to find a footing, instead. Married to an American, and finding myself on American soil for the first time at age twenty-four, I looked for work and found it in an independent record label and distribution company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Working between ten and fourteen hours a day at $4.25 an hour for the first year, standing on concrete floors, pushing a shopping cart from aisle to aisle, picking LPs, cassettes and CDs, packing them, and shipping them via UPS, I got a taste for what it meant to be really low on the totem pole. Forced to listen to strange LPs played by angry young men during work hours, who indulged in mindless vulgarity and obscene epithets strewn carelessly about, I winced in almost-physical pain and went home to practise jazz and Indian classical music with a loving and kind husband.
For that first year, despite the hours of badly recompensed, and mindless, labor during the day, we composed music, played together, saw movies on the weekends at the Capitol Theatre in Arlington, and ate out at an Indian restaurant once a week. I wrote short stories, poems and songs. He composed his music. We performed together. I had vivid dreams. I felt newly born, innocent.
We owned hardly anything — just books, instruments, cassettes and LPs, and later, CDs. I wore old clothes, dressed oddly, didn’t much care for the trappings of middle-class modes of dress and manner. My husband and I were in love, we had music, we had a good, rich-in-music, if financially-impoverished life. Music saturated our waking and sleeping hours, and it was beautiful.
I realized that all my ambitions of my early college years had taken a back seat to all this creative sweetness. It was enough to do music, practise voice and guitar, get better at singing and song-writing and take long walks, after a rough day at the warehouse. It was enough to be content.
I used to be ambitious. It had all vanished.
This is not to say there weren’t troubles in our life. Somehow, anything that smacked of trouble in my life simply rolled off my back. People use the phrase, “water off a duck’s back.” I prefer my mother’s beautiful image in Tamil — “water off the petals of a lotus.” That was what she’s been like all her life. Troubles, terrible troubles, financial and medical, happened to her and my father. She withstood it all, and seems to grow every year into a more beautiful, complete person.
We had our troubles too. I don’t remember them, not much, anyway.
Over the years, my husband and I grew in music. We went back twice for a year at a time to study with our beloved Indian classical vocal teacher, Pandit S.G. Devasthali (now “late,” to use the classic phrase used by Indians as well as Batswana people, like the fictional Mma Ramotswe). We performed Hindustani classical vocal together. I wrote many songs, composed surreal music, arranged them for sax, ‘bone, bass, guitar and drums (my husband’s ensemble, Antigravity), and later for sitar, dilruba, flute, Indian violin (with our dear friends playing those instruments, in the Indian version of Antigravity). I played my songs in coffeehouses and the streets of Harvard Square, as well as the subways and made grocery money. We slept on a futon bed and used milk-crates with cushions as chairs in the living room. Drank a lot of black coffee. Ate veggie-lentils and rice. One can do that in one’s twenties.
I continued to work at the company. Rose in wages, rose on the totem pole, not dramatically, just steadily. Then, came the urge to get settled –that dreaded phrase, which smacks of middle-class ambition and morality. The urge to become a teacher had become paramount. I enrolled in an M.Ed. program at Lesley College, now Lesley University, got my degree, worked as Teaching Assistant in a Cambridge School, while doing my college courses in the evening, got my license, got a job at a nearby school (while finishing the last of my graduate courses and graduated), and have been at that suburban school ever since.
Then, came the house and the grinding work of rebuilding a wreck of a place, while living in it, dust and all. Then, came our daughter. Now, it’s all about teaching, being domestic and homeschooling. I love it all.
And I also miss all that music and creative writing that I used to do.
Ambition is making a comeback, rather late in my life. I’m not crazy-ambitious, just enough to want to publish my three plays, all those short stories I’ve written, all those poems I’ve poured out, and at least one novel before I die.
I want to write, just write. I don’t want to do much else, sometimes. However, I also love to teach. I love singing and playing music. I love bringing up my daughter.
So, I’ll try and fashion a life in which all these strands are inter-woven, and they’ll create a tapestry which will make sense for me.
And I won’t let any rejections get in my way.
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Tags: #Music, Antigravity, Cambridge, Harvard Square, looking back, Massachusetts, Rejection letters, Rounder Records, Writing