Nattaikurinji and Kharaharapriya

I recently performed a thematic concert for my cousin Hari Devanath's music school in the Bay Area, Sri Paduka Academy. The theme was melam-janyam and I tried to explore various melam-janyam relationships. To this end, I picked three melam-janyam pairs: Kalyani-Amritabehag where the janyam has little or no resemblance to the melam; Harikambodhi-Nattaikurinji where the janyam has all seven swaras, yet does not qualify as a melam due to its characteristic vakra usages and despite sharing all the swaras with the melam, has a unique identity of itself; and lastly Kharaharapriya-Sriranjani where the janyam conforms to the very conventional understanding we have of janya ragas: its swaras form a subset of those of the melam and the flavor/ feel of the raga is also very similar to that of the parent raga. For lack of time I couldn't take up the interesting class of bhashanga janya ragas but briefly spoke about it. Many thanks to Hari and Vivek Sundarraman - who also teaches at Paduka - for the opportunity. The energy of the kids was infectious.

Here are the Nattaikurinji and the Kharaharapriya pieces. I can't but add disclaimers: there are shruti lapses (which unfortunately I couldn't notice when I sang), and my obstinate voice refuses to go below the middle Sa - I've a long way to go. But this post is mainly for the accompanists: Divya Mohan on the violin and Gopal Ravindran on the mridangam, both all of 16 years, were great. You'll see how Divya's violin carasses the raga - especially Kharaharapriya, and the gait of Gopal's thani is beautiful. I learnt a ton from these folks!

Last but certainly not least, thanks to my Guru for everything.

Here we go. Needless to say, criticisms welcome!




Last edit: July 23 2012 - included the Nattaikurinji recording.