Stephen Slawek, sitar & Zakir Hussain, tabla | Raga Marwa

Описание: This recording is of a concert I gave in September 1977 at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. At the time, I was a degree grantee at the East-West Center while pursuing a Master's degree in Ethnomusicology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. My East-West Center work was with the late Dick Via on his Cultural Manifestations project. With his support I organized a week-long Festival of India, featuring music and dance concerts, films, and a banquet. I brought the kathak dancer, the late Pt. Chitresh Das and the late tabla virtuoso Ustad Zakir Hussain to be the main attraction. My wife, Anita Gupta Slawek, performed Hindustani vocal music, and the late Dr. Gayatri Rajapur Kassebaum performed Carnatic music on the gottuvadyam. I was fortunate to have Zakir accompany my performance of Raga Marwa. I had just completed my initial training by Pt. Ravi Shankar three months earlier, so much of this performance is more representative of my style as a student of Dr. Lalmani Misra. The sitar I played on was my Radha Krishna Sharma that also appears in my posts of Raga Abhogi Kanada, with Pt. Swapan Chaudhuri accompanying, and Raga Multani, with Shyam Kane accompanying. However, at this time, my sitar had been set up by Nodu Mullick (widely known among sitar enthusiasts as the craftsman who had made Pt. Ravi Shankar's concert sitars) to approximate the sound preferred by Pt. Ravi Shankar. The recording was made on an inexpensive cassette recorder by someone in the audience, and is not of high quality. Given that we recently lost Zakir Hussain, I thought aficionados of Hindustani music would appreciate hearing him in a live recording from his early years in spite of the poor recording quality.