Sitar maestro shows that to seek truth, we must slow down

Ahmedabad: In a popular clip, a violinist — with the help of an orchestra — plays Vivaldi's notes of ‘Summer', with heat and light vrooming away from each other. On Saturday, sitar stalwart Shujaat Khan — accompanied by two tabla players — presented a ballet of lightning notes to conclude Raga Tilak Kamod on Day 3 of Saptak.The excerpt from Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" celebrates the high-velocity passage. It is headlined, "How do you explain that this came from someone's mind?" The Tilak Kamod climax might well be headlined "How do you explain that this came without other sitars, violins, or sarods?"However, this is not an argument comparing orchestral and solo-performance systems. Instead, it is a summary of the great sitar ustad's paean to calmness in music. Social media tends to focus on fast-paced performances, he noted."I want to give an alternative to audiences," Khan told TOI. "Our music has thunder, but it also has the waterfall."The maestro began the recital by letting notes waft like the aroma of incense. Tuning a packed house to equanimity was not a small achievement because moments earlier Khan had rasikas laughing with his good-natured jibes directed at his tabla accompanists. Sapan Anjaria, an Ahmedabad tabla player and one of the accompanists, told TOI, "On stage, Khansahab said before the recital, ‘Yeh dono toofan hai, mein in logon se bahut darta hoon'." In English: "These two play like a storm. I am very scared of them." The maestro was laying down his rules for raga exploration: let us not lose sight of our music's sanctity, innocence, meditativeness. Anjaria and the other tabla accompanist, Shariq Mustafa, demonstrated maturity and never veered into showboating.By the time Khan began singing, "Zindagi se Badi Sazaa hi Nahin" (There isn't a greater punishment than life), rasikas were primed to appreciate music as an unhurried examiner of life's follies.