Pandit Kamalesh Maitra: Rhythmic Waves

Tabla Tarang: Melody on Drums (Smithsonian Folkways) is Maitra's first album on a US label. Earlier recordings include a fine CD on the German Wergo label, Masters of Raga: Kamalesh Maitra, and a variety of tapes that might be available in Indian import shops. But this new disc is truly definitive.

Accompanied by Trilok Gurtu (best known as percussionist for Oregon) on tabla and Laura Patchen on that droning, twangy stringed instrument, the tanpura, Maitra executes four ragas on the tabla tarang. A literal translation of his instrument's name would be "waves of drums," and that is precisely what he creates. He sits in the center of a semicircle of 10 to 14 drums, the lowest-tuned beginning at his left and fanning before him in progressively higher tunings. Maitra sweeps among them to create highly melodic compositions.

Hearing the tabla tarang for the first time is a revelation. There's a touch of a marimba tone, a suggestion of Indonesian gamelan timbre, something of a vibraphone's bass-note resonance. The drum heads are specially treated so that the instruments are capable of sustaining notes. These are drums that seem to "sing" far more than they boom.

The second selection on this new disc, a raga entitled "Bilaskhani Todi," is an absolutely spellbinding example of a drummer making percussive sounds like sobs. Taking the theme of mourning for a 17th-century Indian musician, Maitra coaxes from his many-headed instrument waves of the spookiest, most melancholy drum sounds you can imagine -- 12 minutes of sounds you'd never believe any drummer could create.

The disc's high point, a 45-minute original composition by Maitra called "Raag Mia Ki Todi," begins slowly and unfolds with an elegant logic, gradually accelerating into an ecstatically fleet demonstration of complex, catchy rhythmic and melodic motifs. The closing minutes are quick enough to make you want to see Maitra work his magic in person. Would he appear like Shiva as the four-armed Lord of the Cosmic Dance, a one-man band brandishing what seems to be an extra set of hands to strike all these drums?

In fact Maitra has been based in Germany since 1982, performing chiefly in Europe and Asia, where his tabla tarang has been presented in the context of dance as well as instrumental concerts. But this album of audiophile quality offers much of his rich soundscape. Engineer Walter Quintus creates the illusion that we're sitting in the center of a semicircle of drums. The sounds of Gurtu's tabla and Patchen's tanpura -- the instruments providing the rhythmic and melodic foundation Maitra improvises from -- are completely distinct from the tabla tarang. Few recordings of drummers working in any style have achieved such crystalline clarity and sheen.

Drums have long been stereotyped as rhythm instruments. But this disc just might cause you to begin hearing the melodic souls of drums, the tuneful songs they create in the hands of a singular master.

-- Norman Weinstein