musical workshop with Sanjeev Abhyankar

This year seems to be destined to go down for me as the year of Sanjeev Abhyankar. Not so long after I attended his concert and shared dinner with him, I was privileged to attend a vocal workshop that he conducted at Post Vinings. Spread across two days, in two two-hour-long sessions, we explored raag maalkau.ns, yaman and ahir bhairav by ba.ndish and bhajan and ended with a question-and-answer session after a bhajan that employed aspects of raag bhim palaas. He used very interesting analogies to explain how a raag was different from a scale, and how two raags could have the same tonal structure, and yet be different based on their chalan: like pieces of cloth stitched into different forms of garment.