When the musicians’ resume includes live playing with the likes of Herbie Hancock and Danilo Perez, you’d wanna be at the gig. While the concert by Rhythmic Prophecies ? the “Jazz ambassadors from the US” ? on February 10 at Princeton Club was a rather low-key affair, the music that ensued surely was not.The Curtis brothers ? Zaccai on keyboards and Luques on upright bass ? along with Richie Barshay on drums and Reinaldo DeJesus on percussion, have made a name for themselves in the past two years. They played Horace Silver’s Quicksilver and David Sanchez’s Latin classic Street Scenes with a maturity beyond their years. Melodic bass anchoring from Luques, beautiful motif laying from Zaccai, informed playing from Barshay, and DeJesus’s very earthy percussive textures made up for a unique sound.
Arka Das
The Colours of Italy, a collection of watercolours by Sipra Dattagupta, was recently on display at the Academy of Fine Arts. For viewers who had seen Dattagupta mapping an artist’s route in her earlier exhibition, British Landscapes, about four years ago, the present series comes as a pleasant surprise. Though a thematic extension of a personal artistic journey, Dattagupta’s latest attempts to map routes through an expansive vocabulary of colours is exciting. Be it an aerial view of houses in clusters or the narrow stairs complemented with creepers, it is a splash of spontaneity that imparts exuberance to all her works.
Tirna Ray
Kali Dasgupta (1926-2005) had been a pioneer in the sociological study of folk music of Bengal and a firm believer in the power of oral traditions. It was a pleasure to attend a memorial meeting put together by a memorial committee (Sisir Mancha, February 22) and listen to a scintillating lecture by Sukhbilas Barma on the origin and development of Maishalbandhur Gaan, a North Bengal musical form. The twin concern of the late performer-cum-teacher was echoed by recitals presented by Ganabishan and Loksaraswati. While the former sounded the anguish of the working class in a series of mass songs, the latter rendered numbers stemming from the sociological changes in the North-east following the establishment of tea plantations. Such numbers call for close scrutiny by musicologists and sociologists.
Anshuman Bhowmick
