Resurrecting the potent form of live music in India

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Let the music go live and unplugged! Just live it, listen to it, feel it, sink it in your senses, and let it penetrate your bodily pores. Let its tunes simply blow your mind away. Its melody mesmerises your consciousness, and its beat just sweeps you off your feet. That is the beauty of live music, which transports die-hard aficionados into a trance.
Pivoting around this concept, Live-In India concert series has been initiated to dispense a hypnotic potion that promises to hijack the listeners from this stress-pressed world to an island of redemption. It’s a one-hour getaway call from the daily grind. So don’t hesitate to switch off your cellphones and slip into a blissful musical sonata!
Live-In India has been ascribed as the biggest movement in music by its patrons, organisers, well-wishers, sponsors and supporters since its launch this year. While Kolkata has been the starting point, gradually the destination will change to Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and move out to other cities in the seasons ahead. Moreover, places like Los Angeles, New York and New Jersey have been tipped off as the shores abroad to hit a high note in live music.
In the last two weeks, Kolkata has witnessed a captivating soiree of classical music with instrumental wizards spelling magic. On July 30, the opening concert of this exemplary series was staged with a soul-stirring santoor-tabla recital performed by reputed santoor exponent Pandit Tarun Bhattacharya and percussion wizard, maestro Bickram Ghosh. The enthralling jugalbandi was befittingly termed Fingers & Hammers, as the deft beatmaker conjured a mix of musical matrices alongside the melody-spinner.
Like a native’s return to his roots, it’s back to the basics for live music!
The idea of open-air jalsas or mehfils has almost become a thing of the past. “Where music has been condensed to ear-plugs and emotions repressed to tight-lipped silence, the rains too play truant during the monsoons. We humans can certainly revive our good old classic gems, which have been gathering layers of dust due to negligence on our part. We can definitely resuscitate the lost lustre of live music that is almost on the threshold of its extinction,” says santoor ace Tarun Bhattacharya.
Tabla whiz Bickram Ghosh says, “We want to up the ante of this, reducing the frequency of hosting live music programmes. We would like to reaffirm the valuable significance of experiencing a live musical gig. Therefore, we at Live-In India have launched this undertaking to re-establish live music upon its high pedestal of former esteem and exuberance.”
Well the old school would vouch for the fact that there was a time when a bulk of myriad classical music conferences would be held across the country. Music wouldn’t just be a click away. It would rather be a treasure to pride over at a leisurely pace.
As far as Kolkata was concerned, music throbbed in abundance at various havens like the iconic Park Street, dotted with its restobars during the retro era when jazz, pop and rock thrived to a crescendo. “Today, every singer and composer is racing towards mainstream to make a name, and even movies have outgrown the need for live musicians with an excess of tech-savvy programmers’ ingress into the arena with a superb know-how and usage of software to replace what you call — spontaneous live orchestra bands,” Ghosh notes.
“Live music, being rich and replenished with the golden touch of a live master musician, is the most potent form in my opinion. It is like a livewire. It’s real, organic and unfiltered. Its aesthetic impact on the human brain is inimitably soothing and de-stressing,” says eminent lawyer Avik Saha, who’s the key ideator behind the Live-In project. Carefully curated by Ghosh, the movement features every possible genre of music. An array of around 750 concerts is all set to roll out this year alone.
One advantage of watching a live stage performance is to catch the legendary artistes from close proximity and observe their body language with a keen eye. “You can see their expressions, eyes, face etc. They are great stalwarts of music and have put in a relentless riyaaz with much dedication before taking the stage,” Ghosh concedes, alluding to the symphonic symbiosis lately held between two septuagenarian legends — doyen sarod exponent Pandit Buddhadeb Dasgupta and veteran tabla virtuoso Pandit Shankar Ghosh — after a couple of decades.
“Incidentally, even the Gen-Y is hungry for traditional Indian music. The fact is that an entire generation of untapped and dynamic brilliant musicians is coming up in herds. We need to make some space for our future young talents and provide them with a proper platform to promote their raw qualities,” says Saha.
“I guess the last leg of our Live-In India endeavour will be the rural belts, wherein villagers have still sustained the folklores, its culture and conventions through baul ballads, fakir songs, minstrels, jatras, nautanki, ramleelas and kirtans in their rustic lifestyle,” he further declares.

So, let’s wait and watch how live music regains its rightful place in our lives. Long live, live music. Play on!