Music OnLine : Classics : tabla
His brother is Shravan Rathod (of the composing team Nadeem Shravan), his younger brother is playback singer Vinod Rathod, and his father was a classical musician. What choice did Roopkumar Rathod have but to become a musician himself? Though he's best known for his playback and ghazal singing, Rathod was not always a singer: he labored for years as a tabla player. It took the prodding of now-wife Sonali to get him to sing, and the two faced serious opposition for years because of Sonali's divorce from her first husband. The freeze-out didn't last, however, and Rathod's given star turns singing for films like Border, Hero, Hindustani and Kareeb.
Nicky Skopelitis has made a name for himself in many circles by showing his versatility on guitar in several different styles -- often in collaboration with producer/bassist Bill Laswell. His sound can be bright and effect-laden, or distorted and computer-like when he blasts into a twisted solo. His music covers a lot of territory, from spaced-out, 1970s-style Fusion (a la Miles Davis) and trance-inducing Dub to hazy experimental ambiance and multicultural collages. His albums always feature some of the world's best players -- guests have included Foday Musa Suso on kora, Aiyb Dieng on percussion and Zakir Hussain on tabla. He has appeared on albums by Herbie Hancock, Material, the Golden Palominos, Manu Dibango, Ginger Baker and Bootsy Collins -- among many, many others.Few (if any) have done so remarkable a job blending Gypsy cello, loose, brilliant drumming, flute, tabla and an assortment of other Worldbeat textures into suspenseful, dynamic songs as championbirdwatchers. There are some obvious reference points, such as Peter Gabriel and maybe even Slint, but championbirdwatchers have such a unique, well-thought-out sound it's dangerous pigeonholing them with any firm comparisons. Almost cinematic in nature, their songs feature playful yet sideways-glancing verses patiently working their magic with entrancing melodies, then climax in a distorted, seemingly cacophonous exercise in droning, atonal improvisation. Those searching for sophisticated, organic music that doesn't cater to the Guatemalan prints-clad, latte-slurping set should be ecstatic to get hold of this.
Growing up in London, Talvin Singh was exposed to punk and electronica, and was classically trained on the tabla from the age of five. After spending some time at school in India, he returned to England to work seriously as a musician, and soon developed his signature style. This sound -- a fusion of Indian bhangra beats (Punjabi dance music from harvest festivals and weddings typically featuring a big beat from a large two-headed drum) and drum 'n' bass -- was the right sound at the right time in multicultural London, and he was soon working with such names as Björk, Massive Attack, the Future Sound of London, Siouxsie & the Banshees and Sun Ra. Singh's Anokha club night followed, which showcased the sound of the Asian underground and brought in drum 'n' bass glitterati like LTJ Bukem. From there he launched his remixing career before focusing on solo production, and his debut, 1998's OK, went on to win England's prestigious Mercury award. Melding the sounds of tabla and Bollywood with jungle and drum 'n' bass, OK took sounds from England's Empire past and immigrant future and made them work as a forward-looking whole. Ha (2001) took a similar path, as did his contribution to the excellent Back to Mine series, with selections from artists as diverse as the great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Vibrasphere and Photek. As Singh himself puts it: "Music shouldn't have boundaries. We're living in that time when things have got to unite."
On their sixth studio record, Ocean Colour Scene don't stray far from the mode of their pleasing 1996 Brit-rock breakthrough Moseley Shoals. The band still practices the same retro naturalism and love for soul and psychedelia, but amid the trad modness it gives increasing attention to breezy pop ditties and neo-folk melodies. The guitars are either huge (as on Big Star nod "Golden Gate Bridge"), funky (on the Faces-esque "I Just Need Myself") or rustic and jangly (on the narrative "Second Hand Car"). Either way OCS's soaring choruses swing for the cheap seats without pandering too often. Outside of some horns and tabla accents, and the Van Morrison-esque bonus "Will You Take Her Love," this is territory well-covered. But generally Steve Cradock's R&B-soaked riffs and stylized vintage guitar sonics remain magnetic and Simon "Foxy" Fowler's passionate crooning retains its own brand of allure. JOHN DUGAN
(August 19, 2003)
Over the past few years, this Brooklyn duo have been hand-picked to open for Franz Ferdinand, Daft Punk and Interpol, earning a reputation as stylish electronic music gurus in the process. On their third album, the stylishness is back, along with a certain elasticity of sound: LP3 sounds alternately appropriate for indie dance clubs and late-night chillouts, banking on both mildly cool electro-grooves and more pensive tracks that touch on mild psychedelia and Eno-esque pastoralism. Too bad the good ideas here rarely coalesce into anything that hijacks eardrums. Some beats, including the blippy stutter-step and tabla riddims of “Mirando,” would make a fine hook for a broad-minded singer like Santogold. But many grooves stick to unspectacular drum-machine bounce, and the mellower cuts often feel undercooked: tracks like “Bird-Priest,” full of lounge-y pleasantry that sets calliope-like keyboard stabs over buzzier synths and low-end swooshes, feel too laid-back for their own good. LP3 is no doubt meticulously composed, but too much of it just feels like background music.
Now that Sheryl Crow is forty-three and cheerfully domestic with Lance Armstrong, she says she's tired of striving for hit singles -- but there's one buried on Wildflower anyway. "Live It Up" is classic up-tempo Crow: There's a catchy melody, an appealingly husky vocal, a chorus built around a cliche ("like there's no tomorrow") and other lyrics that show she can be more clever than the chorus (rhyming "inherently self-conscious" with "resting on your haunches"). Most of Crow's fifth studio album, however, is about balladry: slow, lovelorn and, on every track but one, accompanied by a string section. Unfortunately, Crow isn't doing herself any favors with this approach. It's not just that the album would be more fun if it rocked harder; all too often on these songs she's straining for high notes or stranded in an arrangement that leaves her voice sounding breathy and reedy. The track "Chances Are" is gorgeous, though: In a delicate swirl of acoustic guitar, tabla percussion and strings, Crow sings hypnotically about Terence McKenna, "hybrid lives" and the overwhelming world all around us. It's reminiscent of early Van Morrison and suggests new possibilities for Crow -- if it makes her happy.
I cannot tell a lie. On each side of this record, the composer reads an abstract prose fiction over "settings for piano and orchestra by `Blue' Gene Tyranny," and that's it. The vocal style is a kind of hypnotic singsong; the quiet settings are dominated by piano, tabla, and what sounds like a string synthesizer. I like it more than Discreet Music, less than Another Green World, and about as much as A Rainbow in Curved Air. I suppose I prefer side one, "The Park," because I like the verbal content more, although in fact I perceive the reading as music, just like I'm supposed to, and have never managed to follow the words all the way through. A friend who's done yoga to this record--not an arty type, incidentally--is reminded of going to sleep as a child with adults talking in the next room. Then again, a rather more avant-garde friend who made me turn it off is reminded of the spoilsport who used to read the rosary for five minutes just before his favorite radio program. (Grade: A-)
It's impossible to calculate Timbaland's impact on urban music. Beginning in the mid-'90s, the Virginia producer not only revolutionized how hip-hop and R&B sounded, he also changed how pop audiences view the role of the producer. His work for Missy Elliott and Aaliyah elevated those figures into the spotlight, and introduced a singular production aesthetic that incorporated tabla rhythms and electro flourishes. The sound was witty and eclectic, and the five albums he created with Missy Elliott -- from 1997's Supa Dupa Fly to 2003's This is Not a Test -- are among Southern hip-hop's most treasured. They were immediate and visceral, alternately giant and quirky, building bombast out of world music nuances. You can hear Timbaland's influence in nearly every Southern and Midwestern producer, and his sound has been adopted by pop acts ranging from Justin Timberlake to Nelly Furtado. He is among the most respected figures in hip-hop, and in many ways is comparable to legendary pop producers such as Phil Spector.Khan is one of India's most distinguished and respected musicians, coming from a lineage that can trace itself back to the court of sixteenth-century Moghul emperor Akbar. Legend has it his family was responsible for inventing the tabla, the sitar and also the surbahar, a bass sitar on which Imrat Khan has become one of the true masters (he also plays sitar). With his brother Vilayat, Imrat developed a style of playing based on the ancient vocal style of druphad called "gayaki ang" -- the style is more austere and disciplined than that of other schools of music in India. Khan can make you laugh or cry at will -- he displays the tiny inflections of pitch and intricacies of conceptualizing a raga that characterize a true master. In a slow surbahar alap section, he'll often play an entire scale on one fret, and you find your emotions directly correlated to the movements of his fingers. Similarly, on faster sections of a composition he can generate intense excitement with his blistering runs, which often leave a listener breathless. While he has carried musical tradition from his ancestors (like his grandfather Imdad), he also provides the world with a new link, what he calls "the Fifty Fingers": himself and his four sons Nishat, Shaffaatullah, Irshad and Wajahat, all excellent rising music stars in the world of Indian music.
For four albums now, Texas-born, Venezuela-raised Devendra Banhart has been getting serious mileage out of a rock archetype: the mysterioso folkie with bohemian leanings and poetry to spare. On the intermittently terrific Cripple Crow, Banhart's eccentricities -- notably his impressionistic lyrics and a quavery croon that suggests Robert Plant as well as esteemed dead guys like Nick Drake and Jeff Buckley -- enliven meandering tunes that alternately kiss you on the cheek and just kind of curl up at your feet. "Some People Ride the Wave" is a cute piano ditty that sums up Banhart's past as an international vagabond, "Lazy Butterfly" is a sitar-and-tabla-backed daydream featuring half-intelligible sneering and "The Beatles" ponders the early passing of half of the Fab Four before drifting into cartoonishly accented Spanish. But when Banhart sputters joyful melodies on charming, fully realized tunes such as "I Feel Just Like a Child," it's the sound of a talented space cadet finding his bearings.
In 1992, Sophie B. Hawkins broke onto radio with the moody pop hit "Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover." Ironically, more than a decade later, her first independent release is more commercial than ever, reviving earlier Madonna comparisons -- though not always for the better. "Walking on Thin Ice" is a dreamy charm, but dance tracks "Beautiful Girl" and "Meet Me on a Rooftop" settle for shiny and happy. Hawkins is in an optimistic mode, but may be too close to the mix as co-producer with the Berman Brothers (Amber, Baha Men). A multi-instrumentalist, she piles on mariachi-horn keyboards, strings and tabla. "Sweetsexywoman," a breathy torch buildup over tinkling piano, pales next to similar fare by Fiona Apple. And Hawkins strains beyond her range in the also-jazzy "You Make Me High." Yet her take on the Sixties chestnut "Feelin' Good," recorded in a garage with ambient street noise, is refreshingly gloss-free. PAUL ROBICHEAU
(April 5, 2004)
England's Photek, aka Rupert Parkes, was instrumental in the evolution of jungle into drum 'n' bass; his albums Modus Operandi and Form and Function are landmark works in the genre, sounding as driven -- and as strange -- today as when they were released in the late '90s. While sometimes tagged with the unfortunate term "intelligent" d 'n' b, Photek's real contribution was a new degree of rhythmic precision, with beats slicing like scissor-handed ninjas. His dry, blasted textures also helped give rise to the subgenre known as "tech-step." By '00s standards, Photek's beats might seem slow, and indeed, they eased off the frenetic pace of early ragga-jungle, highlighting the space around his distorted breaks and ethnic drums. (Dubstep traces its roots, in large part, straight back to Photek's clanging tympani and tabla.) By 2000, Photek largely left jungle behind with Solaris, a surprisingly adept foray into experimental breaks and Detroit-influenced deep house that featured Chicago legend Robert Owens on two tracks. Parkes went on to move to Los Angeles, where he composes music for film and television.
Not many people have a Miles Davis track named after them, but guitarist John McLaughlin earned that honor for his raw jazz-based soloing which held together Davis' monumental Bitches Brew. McLaughlin's versatility and stylistic mastery is unmatched; he's worn many hats through the years, helping to invent Fusion with his combination of jazz virtuosity and blistering rock 'n' roll aggression. His playing is layered and tasteful, floating from full speed improvisation to open-sounding chords and chameleon-like variations. He began as a session player in England, jamming with Clapton, Hendrix and Jimmy Page, and worked his way up to a brilliant Post Bop debut Extrapolation. McLaughlin moved on to join Tony Williams' Lifetime and Miles Davis' bands, before founding the Mahavishnu Orchestra in the early '70s. Dissatisfied with the limitations of playing a single genre, McLaughlin joined tabla master Zakir Hussain to form Shakti, an innovative and exceptional combination of Indian classical music and jazz. His intense, fruitful collaborations are also numerous: over the years McLaughlin has recorded outstanding albums with Carlos Santana, Buddy Miles, Billy Cobham, Paco De Lucia and Al Dimeola, and many more.
Continuing his two-decade-long exploration of the territory where African and Asian music meet, tabla virtuoso and composer Trilok Gurtu moves as easily within the organic landscapes created by Indian, African and Western percussion instruments as he does within the modern electronic aesthetic. Not one to hog the spotlight, the Indian-born Gurtu allows his guest musicians -- who joined him in studios in London, Johanesburg, Bombay, Philadelphia and New York -- to add their own unique elements to the satisfying, multi-layered Beat of Love. "A Friend," a mid-tempo Afro-pop confection, is augmented by Beninese singer Angèlique Kidjo, whose usually incendiary vocals are toned down a bit here to be warm and reassuring. Indian vocalist Roop Kumar's adds broad strokes of romanticism to the upbeat "Maya" and the staccato, mesmerizing "Tuhe." Senegalese singer and songwriter Wasis Diop contributes his own "Passing By," an incantation imbued with a seductive, summer afternoon feel. Gurtu's music journeys have taken him far from home, but it is obvious that he has made the world itself his warming, welcoming hearth.MARIE ELSIE ST. LEGER
(June 11, 2001)
"I cheated on my metaphysics exam," goes an old Woody Allen joke. "I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me." Human Conditions, the second album from the soul-baring solo career of the Verve's former leader, offers assistance in taking life's tests -- providing you don't find metaphysically minded rock stars a bit funny to begin with. The album contains only one real rocker, the tabla-dappled "Bright Lights" (close kin to the Black Crowes' "Sting Me"), but Ashcroft's mastery of balladry makes "Buy It in Bottles" his best since the Verve's "Lucky Man." And on the gospel-tinged "Man on a Mission," he croons a cutting couplet: "A fortune has been made on all the illness they made/And then we've got to pay for the drugs to take it away." Which is no joke. PETER RELIC
(From RS 917, March 6, 2003)
John McLaughlin's second and last album for Douglas–he's signed to Columbia now–is as different from his first, Devotion, as day is from night. The earlier recording was super-amplified and thundering, with Buddy Miles flailing away at the drums and McLaughlin proving, with tasty lines and sonic textures, that heavy can be musical. My Goal's Beyond is an acoustic album, with one side devoted to eight short pieces for solo guitar, and the other to two long numbers for a larger group, including soprano sax and flute, violin, bass, percussion, drums, tabla and tambura.
The solo side is a kind of retrospective for McLaughlin, since it includes reminders of some of his past associations. There's a tune of Miles'; a reworking of a theme from the first Tony Williams Lifetime album; a tune by another former Miles Davis sideman, Chick Corea; plus a Mingus favorite ("Goodbye Porkpie Hat," dedicated to Lester Young and previously revived by Pentangle) and some originals. The most beautiful tune is McLaughlin's "Follow Your Heart," which he originally recorded under saxophonist Joe Farrell's leadership. It's both haunting and stirring, the qualities in McLaughlin's writing that make it very special.
The group tunes "Peace One" and "Peace Two" are something else. Indian music has been echoing around jazz circles since Coltrane jammed with Ravi Shankar, at least, and it's surfaced and then submerged again in rock. McLaughlin's "Peace" pieces begin with the drone of tambura and the glottal tabla; the western instruments enter later. The lines, especially the unforgettable "Peace Two" with its soaring contours, graft western melodic and harmonic practices over the basic drone. It's nothing radically new, but McLaughlin's feeling for the emotional depth and spiritual ambience of Indian music makes his fusion particularly striking and successful. His solos employ a few sitar-like phrases, along with the open guitar textures of artists like John Fahey, and violinist Jerry Goodman and saxist/flutist Dave Liebman contribute thoughtful, emotional statements of their own. Bassist Charlie Haden is solid as a rock on the first tune, but his big, booming sound is hardly audible on the second cut; an accident during the mixing is responsible for this, the album's only serious technical drawback.
My Goal's Beyond is a quietly beautiful LP, certainly McLaughlin's best. His solos on the first side most of them are really duets, since he's overdubbed chording behind his single-note picking reveal an almost awesome technique, and an overriding concern with, shimmering melodic substance and harmonic ingenuity, while the longer tunes capture the raga's unique encapsulation of abandoned improvisation and restrained, empathetic spirituality. And "Follow Your Heart" and "Peace Two" are two of the prettiest tunes you're likely to hear. (RS 92)
BOB PALMER
Egberto Gismonti, the thirty-year-old composer/instrumentalist from Brazil, is currently one of the most satisfying practitioners of a music best described as international improvisation. It's not jazz exactly, though a decidedly "blue" feeling informs much of the writing, and there are traces of the harmonic and spatial discoveries made by Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter both in and out of Miles Davis' mid-Sixties band. (Gismonti's countryman, Milton Nascimento, reveals this Shorter/Hancock strain more overtly.) The trance-inducing drone of India is also present, with Oregon percussionist Collin Walcott playing tabla on "Raga" to make the connection obvious. Underlying these diverse sources are the bittersweet lyricism and carnival spirits of Brazilian samba and a few heady cross-rhythms that look to African roots.
On Danca Das Cabecas, his American debut album of last year, Gismonti (who plays an eight-string acoustic guitar, plus occasional piano and wood flutes) and percussionist Nana Vasconcelos wove sidelong designs and simple, incantatory melodies into tapestries of pungent song. The artist retained this duet format during his recent American tour, and he and Vasconcelos return to it here for two tracks, but for the most part, Sol Do Meio Dia is a collection of discrete melodies that features the guitarist and three ECM label mates. All these musicians are quite comfortable with Gismonti's compositions, as "Palácio de Pinturas" (a guitar duet with Ralph Towner) and "Café" (which utilizes Towner's twelve-string and Jan Garbarek's soprano sax) illustrate, yet the shifting personnel and self-contained performances dissipate the unique energy of the earlier LP. Sol Do Meio Dia shows that Egberto Gismonti's music can break through its earlier contours, but, as an introduction to his art, Danca Das Cabecas is superior. (RS 279)
BOB BLUMENTHAL
Oregon is an accomplished band which has been getting rave reviews on the New York City club circuit despite the fact that it is serious, eclectic and non-electric. The four musicians are classically trained. They have impressive jazz credentials. They have worked with symphony orchestras, rock groups and "progressive" aggregations like Weather Report. Guitarist Ralph Towner is well-known as a composer for orchestra, film and dance. Collin Walcott studied under Ravi Shankar and tabla virtuoso Alla Rakha. Paul McCandless was a symphonic oboist and Glen Moore was a jazz bassist. Oregon is a framework within which they are able to use everything they know.
Oregon's range of musical referents is thus unusually broad. The band is equally at home with baroque counterpoint, Indian raga, harmonically-advanced improvising, rock rhythms and contemporary classicism. Such eclecticism is nothing new after the groundbreaking work of a variety of Sixties groups, but the skill and intelligence the Oregon musicians display sets them apart from the run of "bold new fusions" and other musical shotgun weddings. The various influences and elements have been absorbed into an attractively consistent style. The band is the thing; the individuals in it are all able soloists, but they have chosen to work together toward an ensemble sound.
The most typical Oregon sound is hypnotic, high-energy acoustic improvising with oboe or English horn on top, Towner's 12-string guitar providing a ringing drone or punctuating with darting single-string lines, Moore's bass providing a full bottom, and Walcott's tablas furnishing the propulsion. It is a sound that springs directly from the tentative raga/jazz/rock fusions of the Sixties, but here the fusion is assured; the style seems to have "taken" so that it is now as natural for young, white urban musicians as the blues was for Depression-era rural blacks. A great deal of study, discipline and training has gone into this music, but it is accessible and easy to listen to. In fact, Music of Another Present Era is the freshest instrumental sound so far this year, and there is enough substance to stand up to repeated listening. (RS 140)
BOB PALMER
Scaling a learning curve that would do the dons of their hometown university proud, Supergrass, from Oxford, England, have graduated from rambunctious adolescence to credible adulthood in just two easy lessons.
The band's 1995 debut, I Should Coco, a refreshing splash of simple pop songs, portrayed singing guitarist Gaz Coombes, bassist Mick Quinn and drummer Danny Goffey as lads out for little more than a pint, a spliff and a snog. So much for modest aspirations. Considerably aided by Coombes' brother, Rob, on keyboards, In It for the Money vaults a grown-up Supergrass into the league of ambitious bands like Blur and well on their way toward the congenial family appeal of Madness. Recasting pop traditionalism into diverse and accomplished arrangements, this rich and spirited album uses horns, emphatic percussion and even theremin to expand the band's burgeoning stylistic range.
In It for the Money repeatedly shifts gears while staying firmly on track, with the exception of the Oasis-like detour of "Going Out." "Richard III" and the hard-rocking "Tonight'" are powerhouses of bent melodics; the chugging party rhythms of "Cheapskate" contrast with both the ticktock bounce of "You Can See Me" and an acoustic ballad, "It's Not Me"; "G-Song" takes a witty trip through a catalog of Beatles influences.
Still cavalier after both these years, Supergrass finish with "Sometimes I Make You Sad," an outlandish entertainment of melodramatic organ, phased singing, grunting human beat box, tabla drums and a bazouki-like guitar solo. Whether or not Supergrass really are in it for the money, this album's great leap forward proves that the group is in it for the long haul. (RS 759)
IRA ROBBINS
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