Author Archives: Abhishek Prakash

I think I should have more faith in the jazz scene in Bangalore, because every time I go to a jazz gig feeling skeptical, I end up having my mind blown away. Relativity maybe, is the culprit. If you have low expectations from a gig and it turns out to be twice as amazing, your mind can’t help but be blown away. Nation Station is about three months old (maybe the primary reason for my skepticism) and was “born out of a need to reinterpret and reinvent the sound of jazz in the country today”, as their Facebook page reads. I would have been less skeptical had I known the band members before the gig,…

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The poster read – Jazz Sessions at The Plantation House, Leela Galleria. It seemed all normal to me – a jazz gig probably at one of The Leela Palace’s posh restaurants, perhaps with a garden! On reaching the venue, I went up and down the Galleria looking for my posh garden restaurant, until I saw Aman Mahajan and Arjun Chandran in a clothes store. I assumed they were buying clothes, and found the idea of purchasing clothes ten minutes before a gig rather bizarre, but that was only until I saw the keyboard and the amplifier in the shop. Turns out the clothes store was in fact the Plantation House! The store is a lovely…

  “What is this jazzu bluesu, I say? In my Carnatic sangeetham?” – Anonymous There are purists in every music form, and in fact, in every art form. Carnatic music has historically been a purist art form untouched by experimentation but in the last few years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of Carnatic musicians, surprisingly being led by the virtuosi, who are trying to evolve the centuries-old music and fuse it with modern sounds, under what can be called fusion or world music. We all know Dr. Suma Sudhindra to be a veena virtuoso and a maestro of Carnatic music, but apart from her regular Carnatic work, she has also been…

First things first – What a venue! The open air amphitheater with the UB City tower looming majestically in the background, and its big bright blue horse logo looking down upon us was quite an amazing sight! And what’s more – for a city perpetually stuck in traffic jams, its habba started dot on time. The line-up on this particular evening comprised of metal aficionados Bhoomi, the multi-genre, Bangalore based Caesar’s Palace and Bangalore rockers Thermal and a Quarter who made a surprise entry later. All three of them, veterans of the Bangalore rock scene, took to the stage with the promise of a great Saturday evening and they sure lived up to it. First up…