balachander veena - S. Balachander - genius on veena

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Published Nov 4, 2010

This video with pictures taken from the worldwideweb features the Side A-second track of a great, very well produced&recorded album 'The Music Of India', a mid-seventies release, however, with no mentioning of a recording date. It's an album by the legendary veena player S(undaram) Balachander (1927-1990), who was a child prodigy, a multi-instrumentalist (but the veena became his specialty and his favourite instrument) and a mostly self taught musician. The album means a lot to me, as it was the first Indian classical music record I owned (I remember I bought it together with a nice album by North Indian sitar and surbahar player Narendra Bataju). This was in 1978, I was 14 then, and this album surely was one of the great 'big bangs' in my listener's career. Of course I had already been listening to Ravi Shankar at 'Woodstock' and the 'Concert for Bangla Desh' - stuff that came to me via the record collection of an older brother - but at the time I found the music of S. Balachander far more impressive. His veena playing was simply mindblowing! Just listen and you'll understand what I mean. S. Balachander's sound is unmistakeable his own, one of the many trademarks being his unique strong 'attaque' on the veena strings, that helps him to bring out the depth and intensity of a raag. His veena playing is unmatched and always 'avant garde' in the true sense of the word. I'm sure evry musician involved in improvising music -from whatever genre of music or cultural background...