Breathing Raga

Breathing Raga is heaven, a full dhrupad performance of raag Bhairav, from alap to bandish (composition). The singer here is Niloy Ahsan, and on the showing of this recording, one of South Asia’s most stunning musical traditions is in very good hands. The slow (vilambit) alap is superb, both musically systematic and showing off his extraordinary range: The low reverberations are thrilling and this deep register is used as an effective punctuation to accelerate into the medium (madhya) and fast (drut) sections. These give a truly passionate rendition of the raga, coupled with a deeply embedded sense of tradition and a musical logic that pins it all together. The alap builds thrillingly to the introduction of the pakhavaj, played by Roman Das, and then into the ten-beat (Sadra tala) of the bandish, over which he floats out a sublime rendition of a text in praise of Shiva to bring things to a wonderful close.