As a country that has seemingly hundreds of spices and tea blends to offer, it
seems pretty natural for India to be the flavor of the month here.
The
second annual India Festival is currently in full flow up and down the country,
and Jerusalem’s Confederation House has also got into the act with a rich
program of music from the subcontinent, in the On the Wings of the Raga
Festival, that will run between May 8 and May 10 at the host venue and the
Jerusalem Theater.
Amongst the thousands of Israeli backpackers who have
done the rounds of India on post-army service trips, a few came home with
musical baggage as well. Deep down, Dudu Elkabir must have been conscious of the
possibility that he would immerse himself in Indian sounds long before he made
it over there. Elkabir is on the roster of the On the Wings of the Raga
Festival, where he will perform on the rarely played rudra veena string
instrument, alongside his teacher, Indian musician Bahauddin Dagar, who will
play the same instrument. The concert will take place at Confederation House at
on May 9 at 9:30 p.m.
“I first went to India in 1996, but I played on
guitar before that,” says Elkabir. “I used open tuning on guitar, and I later
discovered that it is similar to the tuning of the sitar. I also played music
that was very similar to Indian music. I suppose I must have known something
without being fully aware of it.”
Elkabir hadn’t exactly planned on
furthering his musical education in India and, in fact, got there by accident –
literally. “After the army, I decided to go to the States for a while. I was
working in agriculture in the North to get the money together for the trip,” he
explains. “But I had an accident with a tractor when I fell into a deep ditch. I
came out of it more or less okay, but I decided to make do with the money I’d
earned up till then and to go to India to visit my sister who was there at the
time.”
It was to be a life-changing decision. “About two weeks
after I got there, I heard a cassette of Indian music and straightaway I knew
that I wanted to get into that music.”
Despite Elkabir’s instinctive
preference for open tuning on his guitar, which eventually paved the way to
Indian instrumental music, he did not exactly feed off an Indian musical diet in
his childhood. But there was always something unorthodox about his musical
leanings. Despite being only 36 and growing up musically in the late 1980s and
1990s, Elkabir got into the music of such 1960s and 1970s pop and rock acts as
The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. Interestingly, both bands had some Eastern flavors
to their work. George Harrison began studying Indian philosophy and music, and
sitar in the mid-1960s, and the Fab Four’s ground-breaking 1967 album Sergeant
Pepper included a track by Harrison called “Within You Without You,” which
featured sitar, tabla and other Indian instruments. Led Zeppelin’s 1975
release Physical Graffiti features a number called “Kashmir,” which is based on
Eastern energies and chord progressions.
Elkabir’s Indian musical odyssey
gathered pace when he heard a tape by sitar player Ustad Vilayat
Khan. “Everything I loved in music was in there,” Elkabir recalls. “It
sounded like he was playing eight instruments at the same time. There was a sort
of trance music part that went on for about an hour and oscillated between very
slow and meditative passages and very fast parts. It was mesmerizing. I was
truly amazed. I had no idea you could do things like that in music. It took me
to higher places - musically and in general.”
Part of the essence of
Indian culture and Indian music stems from the temporal element. The
three-minute hit pop song ethos is anathema to the Indian way of thinking.
“Anyone who listens to Indian music for an hour or more only realizes what he
has experienced after it ends,” notes Elkabir.
Elkabir met his teacher
when he went to Drahamsala in northwest India. “Bahauddin Dagar gave a concert
which comprised a single raga that lasted two to three hours,” recalls Elkabir.
“There were about 200 people in the audience, including quite a few Israelis,
and no one moved the whole time. Everyone was entranced.”
Once into
Indian music, Elkabir stayed put and gradually became ever more immersed in it,
spending most of his time in India, with only the odd excursion back to Israel.
“I studied music in the traditional way, student to teacher on an individual
basis, rather than in a classroom.”
Considering Dagar is the 20th
generation of his family to work as a professional musician, Elkabir’s lesson
format could not have been much more traditional. “I played sitar to begin with
and, for the first two years in India, I had no idea what the rudra veena looked
like or whether there was anyone around in India who still played the
instrument.”
But he soon got into the groove at a typically Indian pace
of progression. “For four years I did two exercises four to five hours a
day. There was so much mystery surrounding the rudra veena, like with Kabbala,
which you are only supposed to start learning when you reach the age of
40.”
That gentle pace of life will, no doubt, be fully conveyed at
Confederation House on Wednesday.
For more information about the On the
Wings of the Raga Festival: www.confederationhouse.org and (02) 624-5206
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