Thank You For the Music

I remember sending a video clip to cousin Usha a year or two ago, of a girl belting out this old Jennifer Holliday song to win America's got Talent and expressing envy that someone could actually sing like that and that too a 12 year old girl. Her response had been that, well, even if I couldn’t sing or play anything, at least I could appreciate music and there were many who could not do even that. This had not occurred to me up until that point; that there were people who actually could not appreciate music, of any kind. I had always been under the impression that it was just a matter of finding the music that appealed to one. But I guess just as art does not speak to some and books to others, I had to allow for the possibility that music, too, does not touch many hearts.

In light of this new revelation, that I actually had this ‘ability’ that I could be grateful for, I immediately sent out thanks - to Usha – for more than making me realize this fact, brother Ravi, a handful of other ‘musical’ influences and the universe for having let me grow up in London and listen to a lot of the kind of music I later grew to love in my formative years.

I remember little of music prior to my years in London as a child, apart from a few children’s songs from a few Hollywood movies such as ‘Mary Poppins’, ‘Bedknobs and Broomsticks’, ‘Chitti, Chitti Bang Bang’ and ‘The Sound of Music’ that we had been lucky enough to get taken to see. As for Carnatic or Hindi music, though I’m sure we must have been surrounded by both, since my uncle was an avid fan of all things Carnatic and my dad, per my mother, had probably been an usher in a Hindi movie theater in a prior life, somehow I had no memories of those.

Arriving in India close to the age of 11 after a little more than three years in London, my head was full of Gary Glitter, Paper Lace, Shirley Bassey, Rod Stewart, Suze Quatro, Queen, Abba, Slade and the like. But other than a handful of tapes consisting of songs recorded from the radio and about 5 LPs (Johnny Wakelin of ‘Black Superman’ fame, The Bay City Rollers, one called The Sexy Sax – sax tunes with a lurid cover, one with popular movie themes of the time – such as ‘Speak Softly Love’ and one which I can’t recall), I hadn’t thought of bringing all that back with me to India – or rather, things like that weren’t really anything that I could have asked for, since my parents weren’t exactly drowning in money and buying tapes or LPs or SPs of popular music for my brother and me was probably not the first thing they were looking to do. And that’s probably where all my love for English music would have ended. But luckily for me, my cousin Usha, who lived under the same roof, was big on English music and was always humming something or the other. We had an old tape-recorder at home (that played spools) and we had a big collection of Carpenters, Abba, Neil Diamond and Simon and Garfunkel hits. I’m not sure where they came from. They were probably taped from borrowed records or tapes. She was also a big fan of short wave radio - Radio Ceylon (which subsequently became Radio Sri Lanka), the Voice of America, the BBC and Radio Australia - specifically, shortwave radio relating to all things ‘phoren’ - this in spite of the fact that my uncle (and her dad) would try to dissuade us from listening to English music without first developing a taste for the Indian kind and specifically Carnatic music. Thanks to Radio Ceylon, my repertoire of English music grew to include artist such as Jim Reeves, Cliff Richard, Englebert HumperDink, Tom Jones, the Brotherhood of Man and all kinds of others that I would never have heard of otherwise. The Sri Lankans (or rather the Goans and Bombayites, people with names like Stevie, Ryan, Sandra, Cecelia, Marina, Pamela etc. who seemed to be the only ones making requests on Radio Sri Lanka) had a taste for only the most romantic of old serenades, or the catchiest of pop tunes. The BBC didn’t do much for my musical interests – I don’t remember listening to anything of musical interest on it, just boring ‘news’ type stuff and the Voice of America, as far as I could remember had nothing vaguely musical, nor ever played anything that in the remotest fashion could be interpreted as fun. Their agenda was probably not really to bring popular (or even unpopular) music to foreign households.

Radio Australia, however, was a different story. They always had several programs dedicated entirely to music. I remember for years, all through school and college, at least those years where my afternoons were free, devoting entire afternoons to listening to shows on Radio Australia. This was where I was introduced to Men Down Under, Billy Fields, Split Enz, Helen Reddy and other such groups and musicians. And this was where I had my 15 minutes (and more) of fame on the radio. A few years after moving from Secunderabad to Baroda (where the only English music that could be heard were popular tunes sung by folks like Michael Jackson or occasionally a piece by Kraftwerk) I had written in to the host of the afternoon show, Peter Cavanaugh (the name of the show however has made room for other things in my head) for a ½ hour dedication which he did regularly – playing ½ an hour of one band’s music and dedicating it to the person who’d requested it. And I’d given him a choice of several bands with my words ending the list being – ‘And if you don’t want to play any of the above – please play the Beatles’. I guess by the time my letter got to him – and he read it (I’m sure I didn’t use airmail), he had probably run through all of the groups on my list for the afternoon dedications he had done in the meantime and the Beatles were the only ones left on the list. Or perhaps he was a big fan and hadn’t heard them in a long time himself and so picked them as the group of the day. But that’s what he dedicated to me – a half an hour of Beatles music. A couple of weeks later, my brother received a letter from friend Desmond D’Souza in Sec’bad, the last few lines of which talked about having heard the dedication on Radio Australia to me and asking why I was still stuck in some ancient era and didn’t I know that the Beatles had long since ‘croaked’? I’m not sure what he meant since the Beatles were much more than just Lenon. When my brother showed me this, though slightly annoyed and upset at this fellow for insinuating I knew nothing about the music of the day and wanting to write him back immediately that the Beatles had been an afterthought at the end of a long list of hip music-of-the-day choices, I was thrilled that someone in a city so far away had actually tuned in to a radio station somewhere else so far away and heard a dedication to me!

A few friends in St. Anne’s where I went to school in Sec’bad who also liked to at least occasionally listen to English music, or at least had some lying around at home, contributed some to my musical cache as well and through them I was introduced to a handful of artists that though I’d heard of had never really listened to in the past. Folks such as Diana Ross and the Supremes and a whole host of other Motown artistes that they happened to have records of and people such as David Dundas (of ‘jeans on’ fame) that no one today probably remembers or come to think of knew of even then. But the first few lines of that song are something I keep humming to myself every now and then to this day when I wake up.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention music class in St. Ann’s. Silly though I felt at the ages of 12 and 13 sitting in ‘singing’ class with a song book in my hand along with about 60 or 70 other students and Sister something or the other at the piano and loudly singing ‘Sounds of Silence’, ‘O-bla-di-O-bla-da’ (sic!) and ‘Bombay meri hai’, those classes did something to imprint those songs in my memory and make me love that type of music even more.

And one last memorable artiste to enter my world in those Secunderabad years before moving to Baroda was Barbara Streisand. Going to see ‘For Pete’s Sake’ and ‘The Way We Were’ in Sangeet or Natraj or one of those movie theaters made our introduction and I’ve kept in touch to this day.

Moving to Baroda was not a happy occasion. For one thing I started going to a co-ed school. Though I had been in one in London - St. Anne’s, where I’d gone prior to London and after returning, had been an all girls school and I had gotten used to that in India. In contrast, the co-ed ‘company’ school run by the petrochemical company that my dad worked for was full of students who seemed to be from another planet. They all communicated in this entirely different language (Hindi) and very occasionally in the regional Gujarati, though of course they all knew English and this was a completely new experience for me. In St. Anne’s most folks pretended they didn’t know any local languages and that their native tongue was English. So in order to try to fit in I had to begin work on Indianizing my Hindi accent, which at the time still sounded like it was coming out of the mouth of an English person. Add to this the horror of what happened during ‘free’ periods - i.e. a period in which a teacher absconded leaving us with nothing to do - these strange students were in the habit of sitting around in a circle and playing this thing called ‘Antakshari’ – where someone sang the first few lines of a Bollywood song and the next player then had to sing a song beginning with the sound that the previous person had left their song off at. Forget about talking in this language, I now needed to be able to sing in it. So I started going home and diligently listening to the radio every day secretly while my dad listened to it. Up until that time, I had always moved to the furthest corner of the house when he played Vivid Bharti or some such station on the radio, simply because with all the static (this being on medium wave) and the quality of the radio, the sound was just unbearable as far as I was concerned (not to say anything about the music which seemed so foreign to my ears!). Thus came my real introduction to hindi music. I came to like the Kishore Kumar songs of the 70s and abhor Lata Mangeshkar and her awfully high voice. Asha Bhosale seemed much nicer. Mukesh I could never develop a taste for, though perhaps if I had been familiar with some of the movies from which his songs came I may have learned to appreciate him more. It was the same story with Mohammed Rafi. This is when I learned of Usha Uthup (nee Iyer), who sounded like a man, but was cool all the same. So in the end, had it not been for my school and the kids and the types of pastimes they liked to indulge in, I would have grown up in India with no appreciation for hindi film music and not knowing the words to a single popular song.

In Baroda, having my brother around for a few years through all of school and the first year of college meant that I got to listen to everything he got to listen to. So I learned all about rock (it wasn’t yet ‘classic’ at the time) - of folks like Jethro Tull (I think that was his favorite), CSNY, Uriah Heep (who I actually referred to as Urea Heap since that’s what they sounded like to me), Fleetwood Mac and Pink Floyd. And, probably much to his exasperation, I too started developing a fondness for much of this music and started hanging around whenever he played any of it. More college life brought more music to my ears – through friends like Gayatri and Varsha who brought tapes back from foreign lands. I even got my first taste of Western Classical Music thanks to Varsha – Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ something she had heard and liked and passed on. Gayatri’s husband (not then) Subhash and his friends from Calcutta, who liked to sit together and play guitar and sing, brought Jim Croce and Bob Dylan into my life. A cousin in town, Sudhakar, who studied where I did, also played guitar and sang and would discuss music with me for hours. So it happily turned out that I did learn something in those 4 years of college after all.

It was then on to the US of A and one of my roommates, Mohammed, was convinced that I was lying about where I had come from – since I could sing along to every song that played on the soft rock stations. I guess in those days there was no MTV or VH1 or anything that could be had in India so the only English music that most people were exposed to there were uber popular artists who one could not escape no matter where they were in the world (Michael Jackson constantly springs to mind – though the Jackson Five, of course, no one knew).

From then on, of course, there was no dearth of sources for the angrez music. And this is where I got my first real taste of country (though I tired of it quickly – just like they said – you got your car back, your house back, your wife back and your life back if you played a country tune backwards and it got old after a while), jazz (till then my whole entire experience of jazz had been Smokey Robinson) and later what was billed alternate rock. But surprisingly, this was where I also got my first taste of Carnatic music – thanks to buying the occasional CD to keep older visitors from India entertained. The only two folks I ever took a shine to (not that I was familiar with many) were Balamuralikrishna and Bombay Jayashree. Trips to India had friends, who thought I was now just like all the other desis in the US dying for a bit of Indian culture, plying me with CDs of Hindustani music too. So I now knew and came to appreciate the likes of Zakir Hussein, Allah Rakha and Shivkumar Sharma (who I otherwise had only seen and heard playing in the ‘Pan Parag’ ad).

And, thanks again to Ravi, here is where I first heard Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Well, I’d heard him before, I vaguely remember listening to something about him on ‘All Things Considered’ or some such on NPR when ‘Dead Man Walking’ came out – but it never really took - until I heard Ravi playing it over and over and over... Thanks to him too, Nusrat now has a place on my ipod, and is really useful to keep time when one is walking or otherwise exercising – his songs are all so very long. And thanks to Nusrat, I know about Rahat, who sings in these incredibly dulcet tones.

Reflecting on all of this, I suppose I am blessed (and I suppose my brother did have his uses after all). How many people really can appreciate all types of music? Even if I never learned to play anything (not counting the recorder – on which to this day I can eke out three blind mice, or the 6 months of the cello and six months of the violin I had in school – the only memory of those being how heavy they were in their cases to carry) or cannot coax my voice into producing something that can be shared, at least I can listen quietly and sing it all in my head.