Adam Haupt spoke to the mystical Bansuri flautist Deepak Ram about his new release, Searching for Satyam
It is ironic that Deepak Ram’s new album, Searching for Satyam, is being released when it seems that music stores have only just recently started to promote Flute for Thought, Ram’s previous release.
Tananas fans might remember Deepak Ram in the Orchestra Mundo tour. He and violinist John Scar added much Eastern flavour to the trio’s meditative African and often Latin rhythms.
But, says Ram, this is not where his music career began. It started in India, where he studied the flute under Pandit Chauraisa as well as the late flutemaker, Shri Suryakant Limaye. Ram had the good fortune of inheriting Limaye’s flutes.
”My training is in North Indian classical music and I did that for a period of 10 years. I’ve been doing concerts on the university [scene]. That’s how I got to know the guys from Tananas,” he says. It was during this time that Ram lectured music at the University of Westville-Durban where he collaborated with Darius Brubeck on a big band called Gathering Forces.
These days Ram is pleased by the fact that his work with Tananas introduced him to the broadest possible audience. ”To give you an example, we played on Greenmarket Square,” he says, ”and there were these 10 street kids. I was playing this long solo, and they were standing and watching. When I was finished I went backstage and they came up to me and they said, ‘Why you don’t play more?’ For me that was great. I don’t reach those people in the concert halls.
Today Ram lives in San Francisco, where he has moved after a stint in London. Why, one wonders, has he chosen to be out there when the music industry is hotting up back home? ”I grew up in Lenasia,” he explains, ”and it was the group areas thing. I always tell people that in South Africa it was like living in different countries. If you lived in Lenasia it was a different country from Soweto, which was 3km away. You didn’t know musicians who lived there. In that isolation I listened to a lot of jazz – John McClahlan, Al Di Meola and so on. For me, I needed to listen to those guys live, to be in that environment where I can go to a concert and listen to Paco.”
And today, Ram points out, work opportunities in South Africa are still quite limited. ”How many concerts can I play in Cape Town in a year?” he asks.
The new album Searching for Satyam combines North Indian classical music with jazz. While the previous Flute for Thought is dominated by meditative tones, Searching for Satyam combines Ram’s flute-playing with guitarist Eduardo Niebla’s flamenco sounds. At the same time the interaction between the guitar, flute and tabla is reminiscent of Ram’s refreshing work with Tananas. It is highly acoustic. ”The combination of the guitar and the bamboo flute go well together,” he says, ”I always played with piano, which was a difficult combination. What I want to do is have this acoustic- based music, to play live with a lot of improvisation. But I want to do it with a modern sound. That means the use of technology.”
At the same time there are tracks that are traditionally ”jazzy”, because of the role that the double bass and percussion play on the album. The jazz elements are not surprising, says Ram, because ”there is a strong relationship between Indian music and jazz”. In North Indian classical music ”the essence of the music is improvisation. We have some rules. We have a melodic form and a rhythmic form, which is proscribed. Up to 95% of the music is improvised,” he says.
Ram adds that when Indian musician Ravi Shankar first came to the West in the 1950s, jazz musicians like John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillispie and Charlie Parker were the first to respond to the music. Technically, Ram thinks that the key to the successful marriage of Indian music and jazz lies in improvisation and a modal approach to music, as opposed to obsessing over chords.
”My teacher told me that you must be economical with notes. If you have two notes, you must extract from these all the nectar or the juice and then go on to the third note. Then you take the three together and you make rhythmic combinations.” Nectar, indeed.
Catch Deepak Ram on December 10 and 19 at Gandhi Hall in Lenasia. He is also scheduled to do a gig for DStv’s BET Jazz on December 15 in Cape Town