Pandit Uday Bhawalkar - RAGA YAMAN (2023)

AngelicA, the international festival founded in 1991, is mostly known for its programme spanning the most radical musical forms, from contemporary classic compositions to improvisation, from avant-jazz to minimalism, from rock-inspired noise to the most abstract electronics, etc.
However, precisely due to its spontaneous desire and curiosity to short circuit the boundaries between genres and the context restrictions that too often compartmentalise audience types and fruition, the festival has also dedicated its programme to music traditions (apparently) further away in time such as – amongst others – Mary Iqualuk and Nelli Echaluk’s Inuit chanting (which opened the first edition in 1991), Huun-Huur-Tu from Tuva, and the Aka Pygmy group Ndima from the Democratic Republic of Congo – all of this in a natural co-existence with research music coming from “out of the loop” areas such as Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, which AngelicA has been exploring for a few years.
A similar approach informed the invitation extended to Indian musicians (very different among themselves) such as the violinist Kala Ramnath, the legendary composer Ilaiyaraaja (the most renowned author of music for the cinema in the country), and the Hindustani vocalist Uday Bhawalkar.
Pandit Uday Bhawalkar is a Maestro performer (as described by the term Pandit, used in Hindustani musicology) of Dhrupad, one of the most prominent artistic traditions in India. Dhrupad is believed to represent the essence of Indian philosophy and culture, and is considered the form that gave birth to all the most important musical traditions that followed.
Born in 1966, Uday Bhawalkar studied Dhrupad for more than 12 years, following the traditional method of transmission from guru to disciple (guru-shishya parampara), under the supervision of Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar and Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar, and in 1987 was awarded the Dagar Swarna Padak prize by the legendary Ustad Nasir Aminuddin Dagar Sahab of Senior Dagar Brothers – all three of them members of the Dagar Family who have been passing on this music tradition since the 15th century.
In addition to performing at the most prestigious classical Indian music festivals since a young age, Uday Bhawalkar has collaborated internationally with artists from different music traditions, amongst whom the choreographer Astad Deboo and the Ensemble Modern of contemporary music. He has also contributed to the soundtrack of films such as Cloud Door by Mani Kaul, Mr & Mrs Iyer by Aparna Sen, Anahat by Amol Palekar, and more.
AngelicA invited Uday Bhawalkar to perform in Bologna twice, in 2008 and 2019. Despite a decades-long career his production has been poorly documented on records, and it is now enriched by Raga Yaman (IDA 053), on which he is accompanied by Manik Munde on the pakhavaj (a two-headed horizontal drum) and by Aniruddha Joshi and Chintan Upadhyay on tanpuras.
The recording is not of one of his concerts in Bologna (during which he performed the same raga), but of a rendition of the same piece considered particularly significant, which had been privately pressed on CD by Bhawalkar only for personal use in 2006. Raga Yaman is a raga, based on an heptatonic scale, considered one of the most important and fundamental of the Hindustani tradition. It is often the first to be taught to students, but it also offers great opportunities of improvisation, and it is a raga that has been recorded by historic artists such as Ustad Vilayat Khan, Pandit Pran Nath (in the Yaman Kalyan variant), and Uday’s maester himself Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, on one of his CDs from 1991 in which one of the two accompanist on the tanpura was Uday himself.

Tracklist:
1.01 - Pandit Uday Bhawalkar - Alap (58:57)
1.02 - Pandit Uday Bhawalkar - Bandish (Dhamar) (15:09)