I performed on stage after close to nine years. And it does feel nice. More so when you are playing at a nice venue like BlueFrog.
However it is slightly disappointing as I still play junk on stage. Yes, the proportion of errors has come down. And my sound -- my tone, most importantly has changed (how can I ever thank my guruji Shri Sharat Chandra Srivastava enough for that?). But I still made mistakes.
Mistakes in sur. That really hurts.
The pieces where I had to play were rather simple. Actually my friend and gurubhai Darshan's band was auditioning for Coke Studio India. And he had to go out somewhere else. I still have no damned idea why he chose me to fill in his role -- since he knows my incapabilities pretty well. I now think he needed someone who could do at least 60% of the job and at the same time, gel well with his band -- because last-minute changes affect a group.
The songs and the compositions were rather nice. The fellow musicians are all young, talented and yet pretty humble folks. From their point of view I did a good job since they had nobody to go with, and I picked up everything in a single jam session and carried them through the audition. But the other side of the story is that they really simplified the parts so I could play them, and I did practice the next day (I took a day off from office to ensure that). I should have been better.
I also realised how difficult it was to get a band performance spot on. I have always rated classical higher up on the difficulty chart compared to pop/rock/fusion bands. Because classical -- specially Hindustani classical -- is always improvised and spontaneous. It took me years to get used to this spontaneity. Yesterday I felt performing a fixed composition is also not necessarily easier. Going wrong is not allowed at all here. So it is more about your memory rather than your musical sense. You are a cog in a machine which is producing music -- this is the closest analogy I can find. Being a good machine part is not easy.
However it is slightly disappointing as I still play junk on stage. Yes, the proportion of errors has come down. And my sound -- my tone, most importantly has changed (how can I ever thank my guruji Shri Sharat Chandra Srivastava enough for that?). But I still made mistakes.
Mistakes in sur. That really hurts.
The pieces where I had to play were rather simple. Actually my friend and gurubhai Darshan's band was auditioning for Coke Studio India. And he had to go out somewhere else. I still have no damned idea why he chose me to fill in his role -- since he knows my incapabilities pretty well. I now think he needed someone who could do at least 60% of the job and at the same time, gel well with his band -- because last-minute changes affect a group.
The songs and the compositions were rather nice. The fellow musicians are all young, talented and yet pretty humble folks. From their point of view I did a good job since they had nobody to go with, and I picked up everything in a single jam session and carried them through the audition. But the other side of the story is that they really simplified the parts so I could play them, and I did practice the next day (I took a day off from office to ensure that). I should have been better.
I also realised how difficult it was to get a band performance spot on. I have always rated classical higher up on the difficulty chart compared to pop/rock/fusion bands. Because classical -- specially Hindustani classical -- is always improvised and spontaneous. It took me years to get used to this spontaneity. Yesterday I felt performing a fixed composition is also not necessarily easier. Going wrong is not allowed at all here. So it is more about your memory rather than your musical sense. You are a cog in a machine which is producing music -- this is the closest analogy I can find. Being a good machine part is not easy.
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