Hari

In early 2005 I got a phone call from Hari Pal, a tabla player who had just moved to town.  He asked if I was interested in playing music in an Indian classical style.  I was immediately interested as I had always been intrigued by Indian classical music, though I had no understanding of how it worked.  We had a short try-out session at SFU where I was a PhD student in Education at the time.  We played for about 30 minutes and Hari said, "You are very strong in rhythm.  This will work."  Very shortly after that, Hari contacted me to say he had found a sarode player by the name of Ken Wells and that we should try to make some music.  We hit it off very well and both Ken and Hari started showing me the rudiments of raga and tala - just enough to get me into real trouble!

Hari is a real go-getter and soon after that one rehearsal he set up a concert for us.  I have always been wont to jump in at the deep end. We quickly put together some traditional tunes by Ali Akbar Khan (Ken's guru), and I wrote a couple of original things.  The concert went extremely well and luckily someone had a video camera and some kind of audio recorder.  This video has been languishing in an outmoded file format on a broken DVD-R disc until today when I figured out how to extract the data and put the old video together with the audio from another source.  There are a few glitches in the video which have been filled in with still images, but the music is pretty good.  I must say that I am surprised listening to this eight years later at the fact that I did so well on my first time out. 

This show was the start of a long and very fruitful relationship with Hari and Ken in the band Ta Ki Ta and also the beginning (and I'm still just at the beginning 8 years later) of my study of Indian classical music and further collaborations with other musicians from the Hindustani and Karnatic traditions.

More video from this concert to follow if I can salvage it....