To the Mandolin born

In U. Shrinivas’s hands, the folk instrument seemed to have undergone a renaissance several centuries after the original one in Italy, writes Krish Ashok

September 25, 2014 05:01 pm | Updated September 26, 2014 07:55 am IST

Mandolin U Shrinivas

Mandolin U Shrinivas

It was summer holidays in 1987 when my maternal grandfather took me, against my wishes, to a distant relative’s family wedding in Madras. Like many from his generation, he worked in a mind-numbing service job to provide for his family but had this mad passion for Carnatic music, constantly humming imaginary niraval in Pantuvarali as he went about managing accounts for a hardware store in Parry’s Corner, and outdoing Umayalpuram Sivaraman’s tani avartanam on his tiffin box while returning home. He would take into his fold anyone in the family who showed a modicum of interest in music and march them to free concerts at Ayodhya Mandapam and occasionally, wedding receptions. I was special to him because I was learning to play the violin and grandfathers being grandfathers, he believed in his heart that I had the potential to emulate the young child prodigy who was playing at that noisy reception, a chap called Uppalapu Shrinivas.

I liked music, but as a 10-year-old, I had no patience to listen to 150 minutes of it. But seeing that smiling 18-year-old boy hunched over what appeared to be a tiny, alien looking instrument, I was piqued. I had grown up around teachers who frowned on the foreign. The violin, they would tell me, is the closest thing to the human voice. The continuous movement of the bow and the fretless freedom to move trained fingers could do justice to the most complicated gamakas. The mandolin? Pshaw! A poor plucked instrument that couldn't possibly capture the expressive sostenuto of a long alapana, they said.

But by 1987, U. Shrinivas had managed to prove the sceptics wrong. He had taken what was an Italian folk instrument from its distinctly unsophisticated roots and turned it into something that produced sparkling brilliance of the kind never seen before on the Carnatic concert stage. The traditional mandolin has eight strings, designed for nothing more than rhythmic accompaniment, a sidekick, to more privileged lead instruments such as violins and flutes. In his hands, it seems to have undergone a renaissance several centuries after the original one in Italy.

Shrinivas, unlike many of his peers, had a unique advantage – a working knowledge of Western music; he had learnt from guitarist Vasu Rao quite early in life. The realisation that chords could bring melodies to life is, for most musicians, an ecstatic moment of wonder, an opening of doors to a richer expanse of musical possibilities.

It is interesting to note that almost all Indian classical-Western fusion collaborations started out with Jazz on the other side. Popular western music is quite limited in harmonic variations. In fact, four commonly used chords introduced by Johann Pachelbel centuries ago continue to be the mainstay of pretty much most of rock and pop music for the last seven decades.

Jazz, on the other hand, thrives on harmonic improvisation and that perfectly compliments the soul of Indian classical music, melodic improvisation. A rock guitarist would have trouble setting the majestic Thodi to a chord progression but a jazz guitarist like John McLaughlin has a made a living collaborating with everyone from L. Shankar to U. Shrinivas.

And for me, ‘Remember Shakti’, the McLaughlin-Shrinivas collaboration managed to achieve something that other ‘fusion’ albums did not. In most fusion, Indian artists take the lead and the jazz players adapt and follow suit. U. Shrinivas, on the other hand, had the unique ability and grace to put his arms around his collaborators and indulge in genuine musical ‘call and response.’ He adapted his melodic adventurism to make the accompanying harmonies work better. It’s the musical equivalent of making an effort to learn a foreign language when abroad.

In a musical tradition that prides itself on unchanging tradition, Shrinivas was never afraid to experiment. He shifted from an acoustic mandolin to an electric mandolin very early in his career and even modified the instrument itself down to five strings from eight. Listening to his music over the years, I can hear the subtle changes he had made to his setup. The pickups, effects processor and amplification kept getting better with time and every adaptation made his music sound that much richer and more expressive.

That day at that wedding, I can still remember his impish smile when his intricate kalpanaswara korvai befuddled the mridangam artist briefly. He had the creative spark of Madurai Mani Iyer and the finger wizardry of Al di Meola. And as it seems to be customary with geniuses, he left us too early.

[The writer is an amateur violinist, guitarist and cellist, who collaborates with the Internet to make music (of sorts).]

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