Call of Bangalore

Before hearing this wonderfully recorded and produced album, I had only encountered the London-based violinist as a versatile performer of fusion music. It turns out that Jyotsna Srikanth is also a virtuoso performer of Karnatic music, the art music of South India and Sri Lanka. On this album she is accompanied by the accomplished percussionists Patri Satish Kumar and N Amruth. Kumar plays the horizontally-held mridangam drum and Amruth excels on the kanjira frame drum (not a ‘clay pot’, as written in the liner notes). The distinctive sound of the kanjira is created by playing on a lizard skin stretched on a frame with several jinglers fixed to the rim. The two percussionists create some explosive rhythmic fireworks. Srikanth's playing really shines, especially when she uses gamakas (melodic ornamentation) and when a second violin follows the lead player in a lower octave, as in the track ‘Annapoorne’.

The album's title, Call of Bangalore, refers to Srikanth's home town (the world's call-centre capital). Fortunately, the album does not mimic the nervous bustle of this south Indian mega-city. The sensitively arranged title sequence creates the kind of spiritual atmosphere encountered in Indian concerts prior to the amplification age; listening to this CD is the next best thing to a live concert. It starts, as is traditional in Karnatic music, with a composed varnam, but the heart of the album is the mainly improvised, 40-minute ‘Brovabarama’, a ragam thanam pallavi – the crown jewel of any Karnatic vocal performance – while a rhythmic thillana (dance piece) concludes the album.