Mysterious Duality – Just Me

Jayanthi Kumaresh is one of India’s leading performers of the veena, an ancient lute which produces a rich and deeply resonant sound dripping with antiquity. She is a seventh-generation musician in a family that has performed and taught music for the last 150 years and included such phenomenal talents as the violin legend Lalgudi Jayaraman, her maternal uncle, who is a major influence on her music. On this album, Kumaresh plays four short tracks (with abstract English titles such as ‘Mysterious Quality, ‘Strings with no Ends, and ‘Wandering in Dimensions’), where the aim is to create an orchestral effect, despite the fact that she plays alone, on just one veena.

The result is a very pleasing sound but I found it somewhat frustrating, accustomed as we have become to Indian music having a distinct beginning, middle and end. The pieces are without a doubt deeply rooted in the classical music of India but the boundaries between North and South Indian music are definitely blurred. That is not such a bad thing but the liner notes could have been more helpful in terms of telling us more about the pieces, instead of their terse platitudes (in harmony, all things in pairs,’ ‘open, resonating universe’ etc). Even so, the pieces are beautifully played and one would be hard pressed to find any sound in the world more perfect than that of an expertly plucked veena.