The official festival's welcome exploration of Asian traditional music ended by producing more than one first.
This wasn’t the first time that musicians from Rajasthan had visited Edinburgh at festival time but it was the first time that the remarkable Bhanwari Devi had appeared outside of India and it was also the first time that a song common to the three separate traditions represented here had been performed together by musicians from those traditions.
If the result of the latter had a certain tentative, if still very affecting, quality, the rewards of hearing Devi singing her songs of centuries old provenance were profound.
I emphasise hearing because Devi covers her face with her headscarf when she sings and seems to go into a vast reservoir of folk wisdom to draw on stories which, not knowing her language, we can’t follow literally, although we can get a flavour of them from her deeply expressive, beautifully ornamented singing.
With accompaniment from her sons, Krishna Kumar (harmonium) and Indra Chand (dholak or hand drum), these spiritual tales drawn from epic recitations could be both plaintive and rhythmically momentous and when Krishna took his late father’s place in singing the male part of a duet it produced a real sense of occasion.
Flanking this trio, the splendidly attired singers and masters of the bowed and intricately haunting sindhi sarangi Lakha Khan and Kadar Khan were by no means bit part players, adding respectively a sage authority and a roguish charm, with the latter revelling in his tales of trinket sellers getting short shrift and camel decorators being thwarted to the dholak’s insistent, persuasive rhythms.
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