La Monte Young

[Audio,Mp3]#695020001

Pandit Pran Nath

Midnight / Raga Malkauns
Just Dreams JD 003
Jan/2004

cd 1 "4 VIII 71 San Francisco" Raga Malkauns [46:15]

Pandit Pran Nath, voice
Terry Riley, tabla
Ann Riley, tambura
Simne Forti, tambura

cd 2 "21 VIII 76 NYC" Raga Malkauns [61:53]

Pandit Pran Nath, voice
K. Paramjyoti, tabla
La Monte Young, tambura
Marian Zazeela, tambura

"When he would sing, the raga would manifest in the walls" -Terry Riley

A long-awaited release from La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's archives featuring two hour-long ragas by one of India's most important singers of the 20th century, Pandit Pran Nath. Born in 1918, Pandit Pran Nath began seriously studying the raga at the age of six. Possessed with a prodigious memory, he would literally spend hours a day singing and learning hundreds of raga compositions and poems, frequently outdoors in forests or in the middle of rivers. He spent several years living in the caves of Tapkeshwar as a holy ascetic, clothed only in ash, singing for hours at a time amidst the other devotees.

By the 1930s he was regularly appearing on All India Radio to great acclaim as the leading interpreter of the Kirana style. He made his first concert appearance in the United States in 1970 and his impact at this time on American musicians and artists is hard to overstate; Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela would become formal disciples in a student/guru relationship for many, many years. Some of Pandit Pran Nath's other students included Charlemagne Palestine, Jon Hassell, Yoshi Wada, Henry Flynt, Don Cherry, Rhys Chatham, and Christer Hennix.

The recordings presented here feature Riley, Young, and Zazeela as accompanists, and were made in 1971 and 1977; they are the only available performances on CD at this time. Pandit Pran Nath tended to primarily focus on the alap portion of the raga (which is the more meditative beginning section), often stretching it out to forty or more minutes. That he did so is important in that the qualities that figure prominently in the alap -- the drone and the infinitely subtle pitch relationships between notes -- were what resonated so sharply with the American minimalist composers.

Pandit Pran Nath seems like a force of nature on these performances; you can actually feel his voice in your chest as the ragas unfold. His ability to sustain a note for what seems an eternity, and then continue to provide endless variations in pitch are time disorienting and mind melting. For Pandit Pran Nath, music was the force of god made manifest. That he believed so shows in these tour de force performances which I can't recommend highly enough. [MK-Other Music]