Kala Ramnath - Nectar (FLAC)

Kala Ramnath is a tradition-bearer of one of the Indian subcontinent's most respected and most unique musical dynasties. She can be described as 'unique' in its precise sense. Like her cousin Sangeeta Shankar, she is a fourth-generation violin player in a seven-generation dynasty of musicians the first three generations having been court-musicians specialising in vocal music in Tripunittura in Kerala on the southwestern flank of India.She was born in May 1967 in Madras in Tamil Nadu and began playing the violin, a full-sized instrument at that, in October 1969. Her first violin teacher was her grandfather A. Narayana Iyer, one of the instrument's true visionaries. “What he used to teach me, I picked up very fast. I had good ‘grasping powers’, he told me once.” In an article in Screen, one of India's most astute music critics and commentators, Mohan Nadkarni quoted her grandfather saying he was "born into the family of vidwan [maestro musician-scholar] Appadurai Bhagavatar,a noted court-musician under the patronage of the Maharaja of Cochin." A. Narayana Iyer described his father, that is, Kala Ramnath's great-grandfather, as having "a very good reputation as a vocalist and as being an expert on the violin"; he studied singing and violin playing with his father though tragically he died while his son was still a boy. A pragmatist, Narayana Iyer was forced "to look for other avenues of livelihood." He moved to Bombay in the early 1920s where he worked as a stenographer. "I did not forget to take my violin with me," he told Nadkarni. He succeeded in breaking into the Bombay music scene. This included playing violin for soundtrack sessions in films and accompanying musicians like Pandit Vishnu Digambar Paluskar, as well as moving in circles that introduced him to the renowned musicologist Vishnu N. Bhatkhande (1860-1936). He stayed in Bombay for a decade before moving back down South. He and his wife Ammini Ammal had four sons and a daughter. All five children, including Kala's father, T.N.Mani, studied violin under their father.After all, his ambitions lay in teaching, not in basking in the limelight. Only T.N. Krishnan of his sons and his daughter N. Rajam, however, made violin their career and, as his granddaughter recalls, Narayana Iyer "charted the course of their careers." He tackled the problem of putting them on the see-saw of competitiveness (and sibling rivalry) uniquely. He taught Krishnan violin according to the Karnatic or South Indian system and his daughter the Hindustani or Northern Indian system in order that they would complement, rather than compete with, each other. Initially Kala's grandfather inducted her into both systems, a bilingual language course as it were, before she took the Hindustani fork and learned from her aunt, Dr. N. Rajam and her present guru, the magisterial vocalist Pandit Jasraj.Violin played in the Hindustani style has not yet gained the ubiquity it has in the Karnatic classical system. Its kismet may be never to attain a place comparable to the one it has in Karnatic music. Kala Ramnath is doing her utmost to change that imbalance with her fluidity of touch, her subtle developments in violinistic technique and, above all, her interpretative powers.

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