A Raga's Journey in Satchidananda

Improvisation is the act of conjuring for the instant, an adventure in entropy.

Improvisation is the act of conjuring for the instant, an adventure in entropy. Possibilities melting on the tongue that sings, electrifying fingers on keys, making lips on the mouths of brass instruments quiver. Eternity and perpetuity in all its vastness are revealed to the artist, who is continually tying together threads of frequencies. The improvisatory mode of music has long existed in multiple cultural contexts, with Western ornamentation in the Baroque period paralleling the improvised 'gammakas' of Carnatic Indian classical music. Improvisation is at the core of Jazz, a genre spanning eras. It’s hard to imagine an alternate universe where this arcane ritual does not exist, and music would be all the poorer for it.

 In Indian classical music, improvisation is a core tenet: the raga, a curve of note positions, forms the primordial fabric from which artists weave sounds. Modal jazz is also unburdened by the constraints of set chord progressions, instead meandering through a scale like the raga. This is the closest glimpse of infinity afforded to us: “when you go this way, you can go on forever,” said trumpetist Miles Davis. It is this unpredictability that paralyses the listener with ecstasy. In Artificial-Intelligence-esque rhetoric, the musical possibilities branch like fractals. However, when listening to Davis, who complained of classical musicians being robotic machines, one collapses at the altar of human creativity. Only humanity’s elusive spontaneity can express the human condition through its imperfection. Davis’ trumpet has often been described as ‘voicelike’, for its vibratoless timbre and modal hypermobility. In Carnatic music, this voicelike style is called gayaki, evoked with baroque intricacies called gammakas. Like the jazz band, Carnatic kacheris (concerts) are the layering and enmeshing of multiple improvisers.

The musician’s creativity is holy, enshrined in Greek mythology as the three muses of Delphi who formed the three chords of the lyre, or as the instruments wielded by the Hindu gods. Seated on a blooming lotus, Saraswati holds her veena close. The gods are enraptured by music, bewitched in the Indian classical tradition by devotional odes. Carnatic concerts were spiritual odysseys conducted in age-old stone temples enshrining intricately carved idols robed in silk finery and lavished with garlands, preparing the gods to be enraptured by human imagination. The performer, with a command as forceful and intoxicating as the temple idol, captures the rapt attention of audiences. In sitting before the vocalists, flute-players, nadaswaram-blowers, finger-drummers, and tanpura-pluckers, the audience succumbs to the soloist, who acts as both the creator of sound and destroyer of silence — a god-like feat. Instead of the garlands of flowers placed by a priest on the idol’s neck, the soloist through improvisation weaves their own ragamalika, garland of ragas, in a manner as mysteriously ordained as the arrival of spring and as incomprehensibly beautiful as the flowering of its buds under moonlight. Like the saris draped on idols, silk ponnadais (fabric shawls) woven with golden thread adorn the shoulders of performers, given to them in gratitude.

Like the flute-playing god Krishna who held the entire universe in his mouth, the virtuosic TR Mahalingam ‘Flute Mali’ drew from this abyss majestic scales steeped in divinity. His genius is revered by Carnatic greats, called an incarnation of the cosmos itself with a timbre like the whisper of God. The enigma’s talents captivated a throng of fans who could more aptly be called devotees. He gifted to the world concerts and deserted them at whim, famously playing for the Lord Muruga in Tiruttani temple for eight hours ceaselessly. Mali in his drunken troubled genius was eccentric. He sometimes repeated the same piece for the concert’s entire duration, stopped pieces halfway, or simply sat in silence frustrating the audience who waited several hours just to hear a few notes before he fled. As his disciple testifies, “Mali says he sees god within five minutes of playing — he thinks it is meaningless to continue after that and stops”. Mali frowned upon the state of Carnatic music, having had a prolonged absence from the Chennai scene after expounding one raga flawlessly at a kacheri (concert) and abruptly leaving in spite. “Carnatic music has become commercialised and unethical,” in his words, with rigorous rules suppressing creativity. 

Improvisation has long operated as a counter to commercialised forms of music. Soaring in the midst of the American civil rights movement, jazz led by Black musicians was a political act of resistance. Soundtracking the pursuit of political freedom was improvisatory freedom. John Coltrane’s Alabama was a wordless cry of anguish following the bombing of a church in Alabama by the Klu Klux Klan. The other freedom that music granted Coltrane was spiritual, first with ‘A Love Supreme’ recorded in one studio session. In this seminal album and the following, ‘OM’, ‘Meditations’, and ‘Ascension’,  Coltrane’s avant-garde freeness constructs a staircase to heaven. John Coltrane’s meditative improvisation undoubtedly inspired his wife Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda, created after his passing. Its title is apt, the album takes the listener on a spiritual journey like a pilgrimage. Beginning with an education in Indian philosophy, we traverse the Hindu god Shiva’s tall snowy mountain, are steeped in Bombay’s mystique, confront Coltrane’s own grief, and are finally taken to the Village Gate in New York. In this jazz club an ambience thick with haze like incense cloaking poojas, the last track “Isis and Osiris” is recorded live. Sounds of harp, the trembling Arabian oud, the droning Indian tanpura, and intoxicating bass collide like the tops of trees intertwining in a canopy. It naturally follows that indo-jazz fusion projects have emerged: take Miles Davis’ American collaborators, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, or sitar-player Ravi Shankar’s indo-jazz fusion in his 1962 album Improvisations.

I observe the Chennai Carnatic music scene from my plastic chair in kacheri venues washed with clinical fluorescent lights. As the tanpura drones, I hear the shuffling of an older population’s bare feet across tiles which almost echo the coolness of the temple’s black floors. Even as times change, the music still evokes the listener’s rapturous awe. What is still sacred are the traditions that persist in the craftsmanship of instruments, the rebirth of ragas, the mathematical complexities of rhythm. What is still sacred is the deeply entrenched stance of improvisation in today’s sonic landscape. Musical improvisation doesn’t just follow humanity into the future, it resuscitates older fragments of music, giving it a new life. A never-ending ebb and flow, improvisation’s hypnosis endures.