Pure raga, pure piano: Deepak Shah brings Indian ragas to Western instrument

"For East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet."
- Rudyard Kipling in The Ballad of East and West.

The Aurobindo auditorium in Pondicherry's Auroville can seat 750. Two years ago, at an announced-in-advance piano concert, there were less than 10 in the audience. "Every artiste wants a full house of people applauding, cheering him on," remembers Hindustani classical pianist Deepak Shah, smiling at the memory of an evening when he may just have proven Kipling wrong. "But I'd committed to the concert and began playing. Before long - as is often the case- I was completely engrossed, lost in the music."

And then they began trickling in. Devotees, ashram residents, visitors, music lovers and the plain curious; all drawn by the strains of the soulful Puriya Dhanashree raga that filled the air. Soon, the seats filled up and then the aisles too with rapt listeners who squatted where they could or stood against the walls. "I was trying to make eye contact with the percussionist when it hit me that the hall is packed," laughs the 48-year-old with a three-decade career in music.
Alexandre d'Aubigny, American Aurobindo devotee of French origin, was amongst those present and remembers being completely blown away when he discovered the source of the music. "I thought it was an Indian music concert with sitar," remembers d'Aubigny, himself a trained clarinet player. "Most imagined a traditional Indian instrument was playing but were surprised to find a piano, being played in a style we'd never heard before." In fact, d'Aubigny and several others went post-concert to see Shah's technique as he effortlessly went back and forth over the seven octaves. "We wanted to shoot and understand it."

Musical innings
Though this was Shah's first outing of a passion he had been honing in private for several years, his musical sojourn goes back a long way. He has woven his keyboard magic into several big Bollywood blockbuster hits through the 80s and 90s with composers like Nadeem-Shravan and Anand-Milind and also individually created background scores for several Hindi, Marathi and Bengali movies. His light and film music based compositions have seen several of his albums become chartbusters.

Trained in classical music by his singer-composer grandfather Shantilal Shah, he had mastered both the harmonium and keyboard as a child. Recounts this self-taught pianist, "From there to small gigs, to the world of films, was a natural progression. Yet, I felt a void.

I kept yearning to do something innovative and different but tied in a way to the musical legacy of the Indian tradition."

Inspiration for that came at Agra's Taj Mahal in 1997 when he saw Greek composer-keyboardist Yanni in concert. He remembers being taken with the regimen and finesse on display. "It struck me that though melody and rhythm are common to both Indian and Western styles, the former is essentially monophonic (a single note / sequence of individual notes expanded and improvised). The latter is largely polyphonic (multiple notes played / sung in harmonised unison)," he explains and adds, "Western classical music is based on equal tempered scale, and rests on melody, harmony and counterpart while our music is all about swar (12 notes and intervening semi-tones) and taal (a cycle of beats, beginning with a stress point 'sam' and ending with a release point 'khali.')."

Long after the concert was over, the music and its process stayed with Shah. "The grammar of the West's music and ours is very different. They go by written music. For example, irrespective of who's playing / singing and howsoever many times, every single rendition of Johann Sebastian Bach's Toccata in E major will be the same. On the other hand, ours is an oral-aural, guru-shishya tradition, things are a lot more fluid and improvisation is king. Not only two performers but even two performances by the same artiste, can rarely be alike!"

Experiment begins
Wondering what it would be like to borrow the West's grammar and parameters for Indian classical music, he began experimenting with the keyboard and piano. "I began playing ragas from Hindustani classical on the piano and found the reaction of those around quite good. I then began working on building my repertoire of ragas," he points out quickly adding, "I've of course tried to stick to ragas which lend themselves better to the instrumental style."

A traditional concert begins with the alaap (melodic improvisation that introduces and develops a raga in an unmetered, improvised manner, accompanied by only the tanpura drone in a slow tempo.) Musical phrases being rendered rarely travel more than a note higher/lower than the ground covered making the entry into a new octave a beautiful experience for both the performer and the listener. This is followed by the introduction of a steady pulse into the alaap, called jor. When the tempo increases so that rhythm overtakes melody, it is called jhala. "Given current truncated attention spans, I've worked out a structure where all this unfolds in five-six minutes," offers Shah, who mimics the tremolo-style suited for the mandolin while playing the piano. "The flourish and energy this brings to the performance can almost give one a high."

Isn't it a challenge considering how several maestros often take over an hour to explore a raga? "We try to help this process with mood-suitable lighting and a visual backdrop which complements the raga being presented so that even the uninitiated are able to tune in," he explains. An accompaniment by a live string segment of violins and violas, a chorus and a sitar, flute, tabla and pakhawaj complete the ensemble led by a conductor.

Many, like music historian Mukul Joshi who attended Shah's concert in Mumbai a fortnight ago call his work revolutionary. "His music creates new dimensions, and presents our existing traditional approaches to Hindustani classical music with aesthetic, contemporary, symphonic layering. The way Indian classical ragas have been composed in syncopated harmony, and presented in a symphonic manner, juxtaposes fine nuances of Indian music with the rich grammar of the West."

Melting pot of music
From the harmonium (introduced to India by the missionaries in early 19th century) and the violin (now a staple of Carnatic music concerts) to the guitar (the Hawaiian guitar was modified into the Mohan Veena by India's first Grammy Award winner Pt Vishwa Mohan Bhatt) and even the saxophone (which Pt Kadri Gopal Nath pioneered in Carnatic music), there is no dearth of Western instruments which Indian music has made its own. "But the piano is completely unlike these. Its rigidity of the notes would make its use for Indian symphonies, the unthinkable. That's what makes Deepak Shah's work so special," says Joshi, who is quick to add, "Let no one be mistaken about the purity of the Indianness of Shah's music. Mind you, I'd gone for the concert expecting it to be an idli-with-sauce affair which I wouldn't sit through. I not only sat through the concert but came to the realisation that Shah maybe playing the piano but it is, at the end of the day, pure Hindustani classical music."

Not one to sit on his laurels, Shah underlines the one thing he would like to improve. "Western music moves distinctly from one note to another while Indian classical music navigates even the semitonal calibrations in between to go back and forth in what we call the meend. I haven't been able to quite do that with the piano," he admits and explains, "The piano in structure is more like the santoor in a sense. But there, the artiste bends the metal wires to get that effect which I can't do at the moment. The arrival of a new sliding note piano holds promise of changing all that."
Considering how beautifully he has proven Kipling wrong, one can hardly wait...

Flying fingers 
While many find Deepak Shah's music mesmerising, watching his fingers fly across the piano keys at 395 keys per minute is another kind of delight. "The speed is just a matter of practice over years," he offers modestly. Yet he has fans in internationally recognised pianists like Yuja Wang.

His efforts at recognition by the Guinness Book of Records has, however, drawn a blank. "They simply don't have category for Hindustani classical music and will only look at Western music they have said in their correspondence. As the world gets smaller one expects ease in widening horizons of understanding but that's not happened in this case," he laments. Perhaps the deafening applause at the end of his concerts will reach the concerned and recognition will find him.