46 l SRUTI September 2016

INTERVIEW

Born in a music-rich milieu, Vasumathi Badrinathan has been a performing Carnatic musician for over two decades. She has toured extensively in Europe, Asia Pacific and

African countries and presented vocal concerts at several national and international festivals. Having grown up in cosmopolitan Bombay, she is fluent in Tamil, Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati. She has a Doctorate in French, which is like a second native language to her, and is conversant with Spanish and Russian.

Vasumathi has produced and presented many culture-based shows for radio and television channels. TV5, the French Television channel awarded her “Best Poetic Adaption” for her musical piece on India, based on the novel The City of Joy by the French author Dominique Lapierre. She was featured in the Spanish documentary Totems, Singing To The Invisible – a walk through different musical and religious realities around the world.

A graded artist of All India Radio, an empanelled artist of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), Vasumathi is the recipient of numerous awards. She has collaborated with musicians of different genres in India and abroad.

Here, she talks about where and how music has taken her.

Tell us about your Carnatic music grooming and background.

Music has always been an integral part of my life. My parents were well versed in Carnatic music, having learnt vocal music from Yagneswara Bhagavatar (nephew of Harikesanallur Muthiah Bhagavatar) and T.R. Balamani, and veena from Devakottai Narayana Iyengar.

I learnt Carnatic music from my mother Padma Seshadri, after which I came under T.R. Balamani’s tutelage. I learnt Bharatanatyam from Guru T.K. Mahalingam Pillai. The two were complementary – Sir asked me to sing when other students danced. In fact, my interest in padam-javali was whetted by singing for dance.

Learning from stalwarts and being an heir to such a solid, traditional pathantaram honed my musical perception. At the same time, I have cultivated an innovative, avante-grade approach to the arts. Although my focus remains on music, I continue to give lecture-demonstrations connecting music and dance.

I had my dance arangetram in 1982 and made my formal music debut in 1983. I am a graded All India Radio artist. While it is always a challenge for a Mumbai-based musician to make a mark in

Chennai, the Mecca of Carnatic music, I have had the good fortune of establishing an excellent rapport with audiences abroad, especially in Europe. I believe that the musician’s personality, presentation skills and the way she projects her music, all play an equal part in the success of a performance.

What was it like to perform in far flung places?

I count my concert at the prestigious Fes Festival of World Sacred Music in Morocco in 2007 as one of my most memorable experiences.

I have had the privilege of taking Carnatic music to places like Azerbaijan, where I was invited to perform at the International Mugham Music Festival in 2008-9, and where I have been a regular participant since. Legendary Azerbaijani musician Aalim Gasimov came backstage with an interpreter and said he had never heard such beautiful music before.

I have performed at Baku, Russia, with the renowned Salman Gambarov and his troupe Bakustix Jazz. Linked only by the language of music, ours was an eclectic performance, with Gambarov on the piano, Oriental percussion, bass guitar, trumpet and Iraqi Maqam and Carnatic vocals. As diverse strands of music came together beautifully, we learnt a lot from each other, and our concert was adjudged the best at the festival.

The popular misconception is that in such collaborative performances, there is bound to be dilution. On the other hand, I believe that a

Vasumathi Badrinathan

In conversation with Gayathri Sundaresan

music tradition as vast as ours grants us the liberty to go forth and create, weave a new musical tapestry, and collaborate. It is not a patchwork quilt, but a meeting, blending, give and take, with a lot of improvisation and spontaneity. Among the many fascinating pieces we presented was one called Charukesi Shikastesi. The Iraqi singer sang Shikastesi, a very traditional piece in Maqam, followed by my turn in raga Charukesi with a short swaraprastara and an interesting percussive element set by Aamir Elsaffar to an eleven-akshara beat.

My journey in Azerbaijan continues. Mugham/Maqam, the classical music of Iraq, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, has been a serendipitous discovery. I am fascinated by its vocalisation, its similarities to our raga and niraval, gamaka and azhuttam, and its rich heritage, which includes lyrics recorded in ancient handwritten manuscripts. When Sakina Ismailova, the M.S. Subbulakshmi of Mugham music, wished to collaborate with me, it was our music that did all the talking for us. Together we performed Mu-Raagam at Kolkata’s Fusion Fiesta last year. A unique project that brought together Mugham and Carnatic music, Mu-Raagam was all about reviving lost and forgotten threads of continuity between traditions through melodic curves. It was a historic confluence of two classical forms, two rich cultures.

At the World Summit of Francophony in Montreaux, Switzerland, I was invited to be part of a travelling caravan that would take arts to the people. Journeying with several other poets, playwrights, theatre persons, writers and dancers to picturesque little towns and villages and performing in amazing venues from churches to little cafés, certainly proved to be a lifetime experience. A most unforgettable episode occurred at Saigelegien, Switzerland, a tiny village with only one café. On one of my walks, I was stunned to find on the wall of an abandoned log cabin – a portrait of Subramania Bharati! In that remote little hamlet where I least expected to have a rendezvous with our firebrand Tamil bard, I sang Aasai mukham marandu poche to share his legacy with fellow artists, and what an instant chord it struck!

At one event where I sang and demonstrated through abhinaya the spectrum of emotions that make up sringara, a young Greek girl was moved to tears because she could perfectly understand the emotive content beyond words. This led me to work with Mimi Barthelemy, iconic Haitian raconteur now in her seventies, to whose legend about fire I contributed scenes from the Ramayana. I have worked with the French acoustic band Yapa, and produced an album titled Wagamumbai with a troupe from Wagadugu, Africa.

Tell us about your projects and novel presentations.

I enjoy presenting lecture-demonstrations on topics as varied as padams and javalis, concert music versus

music for dance (at Narada Gana Sabha during the December season) and sacred texts such as the Azhwar pasurams.

Apart from my albums on Telugu and Tamil padams, which have been favoured by dancers, I presented at Coimbatore an exclusive four-hour thematic concert on sringara, with every song in Tamil.

I have worked on thematic multimedia productions such as Stree Gaanam, a performance that pays tribute to women composers in South Indian music on International Women’s Day every year in a different city, and honours women achievers from all walks of life.

Mahatmarpan, my homage to Mahatma Gandhi and his ideals through music, was another multimedia production first presented in the Indian Consulate in Dubai on Gandhi Jayanti before a distinguished, multilingual audience.

At the French Touch Festival organised by the Alliance Francaise de Bombay and the French Embassy in India at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai in March 2008, I was part of an interesting experiment in which four talented artists spray-painted on large canvases (that would later be auctioned for charity) as I sang traditional Carnatic kritis.

In 2008, I participated in Univers Palimpseste, a network of interactive multimedia installations where the art of several French and Indian artists collaborating from different ends were brought together through digital technology by French artist Beatrice de Fays.

I recently completed a five-month tenure as a Fulbright scholar, working on several projects such as Shree: Feminine Divine, Catholic-Hindu chants, a Carnatic-Jazz presentation Concerto Sangeetam, for which I composed a Carnatic piece titled Sapphire and Ragamalika – a piece transcribed to Western classical notation by Maurice Delage in the early 1900s after hearing Coimbatore Tayi’s rendering of an arutpa.

Any other interests?

I have written and published extensively on music in several leading newspapers and magazines. These include a detailed essay on Shanmukhananda Hall for Sruti in the 1980s, an article titled The Great Divide about Hindustani and Carnatic music for The Indian Express in the 1990s, Saga of the Raga, a serial radio feature broadcast in all SAARC countries, and not least, my regular column titled Noteworthy in The Asian Age, which completed a century in 2015!

With staunch support from my family, I continue to be engaged in many creative activities that complement each other and converge in music. As they say, the journey has just begun. n