My friend Marie Saintonge recently spent six months in India, studying the bansuri with Kiran Hegde, himself a student of legendary violinist N Rajam. Marie has since invited him to Canada, where he is currently spending two months performing and teaching. I am very happy to be accompanying him for all his Canadian concerts and workshops.
Kiran has a very sweet sound, and plays in a very vocal style, though is not shy to bring out the more 'instrumental' aspects of bansuri playing as well, from the slowest vilambit ektaal, to a blazing fast drut.
Our first concert took place at the Grande Bibliotheque in Montreal on May 11.
The next day, I accompanied Kiran for a hands-on raga workshop that he gave at Timpano Percussion. Quite a few musicians came, and we had singers, flutists, a saxophonist, and even a fretless electric guitarist!
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| Marie, during the workshop. |
A couple of weeks later, we headed to Toronto, for a concert graciously hosted by Joanna de Souza and Ritesh Das from M-DO/Toronto Tabla Ensemble, at the lovely St-Stephens-in-the-Fields church. Here, we were joined by longtime collaborator, and Kiran's Guru-bhai, Jake Charkey, for a rare bansuri-cello jugalbandi. Jake and I have performed numerous times before in Montreal, before he headed out to Mumbai to study with N Rajam. He has been there for the last three years, and so it was great to be playing together again, and to hear the progress he has made in all this time.
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| Kiran's solo, with Joanna on tanpura. |
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| Here with Jake, for the bansuri-cello jugalbandi. |
The next morning, we hit the road, and were back in Quebec for a concert at the beautiful Sivananda Ashram, in Val Morin.
We also performed a house concert last week, but I unfortunately don't have any photos of that occasion. There is yet one more concert to take place on this tour, on June 26 at an art gallery in Ste-Hyacinthe. Please see my website for more details...
Thank you to Caroline Tabah for the photos!
