Chandana Bala Kalyan leans forward, starts her phone camera, and begins to sing. The melody: instrumental jazz classic ‘Take Five,’ sung Carnatic style. She uploads the video to her Facebook page. Four-and-a-half months later, it has over 2.3 million views.
“35,000 shares!” she exclaims, when I meet her. “I don’t know where all these people are coming from!” And she knows of at least 30 people covering it. “A boy in Syria played it, tagged me. He wrote about the pain he saw every day, and how this made him forget it. That the music has crossed boundaries and gave him some kind of peace: that is so overwhelming.”
What made the video catch fire? Her vocal skills are evident, but the song has been covered by talented musicians from many traditions before. Surely the complicated thing she did with her hands, each one following a different rhythmic cycle, was something only connoisseurs would notice? Maybe it was the half-smile her face wears even in repose, broadening to rapture as she sings? She laughs at the last bit: “I hear that a lot!” The answer, perhaps, lies in a combination of these; she certainly has no idea. “I’ve been asked to speak about this. I would make a fool of myself: I don’t know anything about social media!”
There have also been career benefits. “New people are hearing about me. I’m getting work, to do my kind of music, solely because of those videos,” she says. “It’s almost like an open biodata. I’ve got a couple of live shows. I got to collaborate with some artistes in Hyderabad, some international collaboration possibilities have been opening up. In Bangalore, I used to get regular performances when I lived there; then there was a long break when I moved out. Now, people in Bangalore are calling again, asking me to sing for projects, recordings, and so on.”
Mumbai, 17/10/2018: Renowned Carnatic singer Chandana Bala posr for the The HIndu at her residence in Mumbai on Tuesday, October 16, 2018. (Pictures to go with Peter Griffin's story) Photo: Dinesh Parab.
Tuning in
This slice of fame does not come to someone who has not paid her dues. Her father is violinist S Nataraja Murthy, and her mother, Damayanthi, sang Telugu movie songs and light music. “My dad says that at three or four I would repeat what he was teaching his students; I began singing literally in his lap.” She started learning formally at around eight and began performing at 12.
In 2004, she married and moved to Hyderabad and in 2006, her husband got a job in Mumbai. In both cities, there were few singing opportunities. She would maybe get one or two concerts a year.
“For a great part of my life I didn’t venture much out of Carnatic, even in what I listened to,” she recalls. She now began widening her musical horizons. She met Taufiq Qureshi, percussionist and composer, and through him, jazz musician Sanjay Divecha, who was looking for an Indian singer for his band. This was a turning point: “My understanding of parallel genres began.” Percussionist Sankarshan Kini became a good friend. “He was exploring jazz through the sargam , and we would jam.” She also became part of the Rajeev Raja Combine. “In Carnatic, melody is king; everything else is written around it. In this band, the canvas is jazz progressions and the Indian element is composed on it.” She is also in two other groups. Viveick Rajagopalan’s band, she says, is Carnatic-based, “but he being a percussionist, the foundation comes from there and we write melodies on top of it”. InDiva, also with musicians from different traditions, explores music with pop and folk flavours.
Discovering genres
She remembers that in her early 20s she was offered a chance to sing for a star film composer but said no, because her father thought she should stay focussed on Carnatic music. “Had I gotten it, I may have become a very successful playback singer, but I wouldn’t have discovered the potential of different genres, adopting them and singing them with my sensitivities. I feel the blessings have come, just later,” she says.
Chandana began experimenting sporadically with videos in 2016. “I had started working on my independent album. I had worked on the compositions, made everything read,” she recalls. “But for me to bring out that album was becoming very difficult. The singles needed the medium of a video, and videos are expensive. The production cost of just the music would be 25 to 30 thousand, but the cost of a video would be 40 to 50 thousand. As a musician, if you had that kind of money to spend, you’d rather put it into bringing out another nice track. But without the visual medium, people were not even listening to those songs. I was unable to bring a lot of my creative work out because I didn’t have a video to go with it. So I started this thing of shooting video of just me singing the songs I actually wanted to sing, the music I wanted to share.”
What kind of reactions has her experimentation got her from traditionalists? “When I was first learning, had I tried to do all this, I would have been labelled as somebody who was polluting the tradition. Now with the Internet, people from the Carnatic tradition are able to understand when something from another genre is very challenging, exciting, tricky, and appreciate it. Still,” — a wry smile — “purists will be purists. As long as my gurus and my parents accept what I’m doing, I’m fine.”
The Rajeev Raja Combine will perform today at The Sunset Sessions, Lonavla, Maharashtra. Phone: 9820045921
