(TV) TV's possible Oriental influences

["leif joley" <leifjoley@hotmail.com>]

X-mas greetings to all - from India?

Yes, this Swede has travelled 'cross the planet to participate in a critics' 
jury at the Int'l film festival in Kerala, southern India. What an 
adventure! Especially the closing night of the festival, when I surprisingly 
was "called upon" as the spokesman of our jury - the three of us in this 
jury in question had agreed on that the Australian mate would enter the 
stage to present the winner and hand over the diploma, since his abilities 
in English was by far the best, but apparently the festival management saw 
the me as a more exotic individual to be showed on-stage. That's on-stage in 
front of 5,000 people attending the outdoors auditorium and a possible 
multi-hundred million-headed audience in front of their TV sets, since it 
was a live broadcast in this big country. How could I screw up so badly? 
There were about twenty people gathered on the stage, and I saw this 
prominent man in his white robe getting up from his chair on the right side 
of me, but I never realised that I was supposed to just announce the winner 
and then hand over the goddamned diploma to him, the tourist minister of the 
state of Kerala, who then in turn should hand over the paper to that woman 
who accepted the award on behalf of the film's director. I stole this 
tourism minister's long-awaited moment in the national television spotlight; 
actually, I insulted him. Some of the Indians might have been shocked by 
this almost colonial behaviour from me, an alien middle-aged caucasian.

Prior to the award-ceremony was an stunning musical performance, conceived 
by Keralaean composer (and film director) Lenin Rajendran. If that's an odd 
first name, reputation has it that his brother's first name is Stalin; the 
state of Kerala is a Communist stronghold, and has been ruled by the Commie 
party on and off since the 50's, so that might explain something to the 
choices of names. Rajendran had put together a band of fifteen musicians, 
ten of them percussionists, and written a twenty minute long, thundering 
piece based on traditional ragas. I believed the raga was soft, atmospheric 
sitar-noodling, but what do I know? This was pure exaltation, a musical 
knock-out, with the drummers beating on their instruments like devils around 
a fiddler and a vina player, who delivered frenetic solos and repeating, 
hypnotic themes; this music could absolutely be part of the entertainment at 
a Western world rave arty.

I was told by Indians that this was pure folk music, although newly-written, 
and that it could not, in any respect, be considered as contemporary Indian 
music. Which made me contemplating about how different folk music could be 
in different parts of the world. The traditional Indian music certainly 
differ from the Swedish ditto, which to a high degree is lame, 
non-percussion music.

Further contemplating: when I heard the playing on the vina (an instrument 
in the sitar family, but with a much lower tuning), I heard obvious 
similarities to the Verlaine way of playing. Not sure about how, since I 
can't read notations and analyze the harmonics, but this vina player threw 
out improvisations that sounded acutely Verlainian; some of Richard 
Thompson's soloing on electric guitar have made me think about him and 
Verlaine as musicians with a common sensibility, but this Indian dude took 
the resemblances to the Verlaine melodical oeuvre quite a few steps further.

I reckon that it's unlikely that this vina virtuoso have been influenced by 
Tom Verlaine, but the other way around might be a possibility - not this 
very person on stage in Kerala, but that Verlaine has listened to Indian, or 
Oriental, stuff. I have a vague memory of TV saying in an interview that he 
liked Indian film soundtracks. But what traces of that could we find in his 
own music? Perhaps the "Bomb" soloing? The new "Persia"? The melodic 
structure in "Ancient Egypt"? His final solo in "1850 or so" on the official 
live recodring from 1992 (or '93)? Is "Clear it away" a long-shot?

It could be worth to discuss. At least it could open to a more intriguing 
discussion than about the well-chewed influences of Coltrane and Ayler.

Leif J, soon back in Sweden
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