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Perhaps Dan lives by the beat of a different drum.
Rare Sound of a Woman's Drum Enlivens Hushed Kabul
By CARLOTTA GALL
Published: February 5, 2005
ABUL, Afghanistan, Feb. 4 - Kabul's badly depleted music scene received a welcome injection of excitement last week with the arrival of Suphala, the New York-based tabla player and composer, who held a joint concert with some of the Afghan capital's most celebrated classical musicians.
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One of the first foreign musicians to visit the war-battered city - and a rarity as a woman performer on the tabla, a pair of small hand drums traditionally played by men - Suphala packed a concert hall here. Reporters from Afghanistan's leading private television station, Tolo TV, followed her around town. Local companies and donors sponsored the concert last Thursday in a new hall at the private Foundation for Culture and Civil Society.
But it was the welcome Suphala received from Afghanistan's master musicians that set her visit apart. The musicians, who had survived years of war and repression only to be silenced completely under the Taliban, gathered to play for her, gave a lunch at the mostly destroyed musicians' quarter in the old city, and then, in an unusual break with tradition, joined her on stage.
Suphala, an Indian-American who was born and raised in Minneapolis, trained with India's leading tabla masters, the late Ustad Allarakha and his son, Ustad Zakir Hussain, in Mumbai, the former Bombay. This itself brought her ready acceptance among the proud Afghan musicians. Afghanistan's classical music traces back to India, the source of Kabul's first court musicians. The tabla is well known and loved here, since it is one of the main instruments in Afghan classical music.
"It's a rule, we always respect anyone who puts their hand on a tabla," said Khalid Amahang, one of five young tabla players who joined Suphala during the concert. But a woman as tabla player is unheard of in Afghanistan today. In fact, there are no known female instrumentalists left, after the deprivations of two decades of war, a fundamentalist Islamic government that banned women from television in the early 1990's, and then the Taliban, which banned women from public life altogether and prohibited the playing of music by both men and women. There are women who are professional Afghan singers, but they live abroad, and none have returned to perform in Afghanistan since the Taliban were ousted.
"I have not played with a woman before," Mr. Amahang said. "Our grandfathers do not even know of it." In fact, there were some female instrumentalists in the 1970's, but mostly players of the harmonium and the rebab, a classical lute.
Ahmad Shah Shahidahi, a tabla player from a leading musicians' family, said that it would be good if Afghan women could play. "It would create some brightness," he added.
Suphala certainly brought brightness, in her gold-embroidered Indian clothes and a full-length white rabbit fur coat, which she bought hastily after arriving in snowy Kabul in sandals. She brought her own mix of traditional and modern musical compositions. Her touch and rhythm are sure, and she held her own as she played with a group of five young Afghan players.
Two old Afghan masters of the tabla and the dilruba, a stringed instrument, played alone, and Suphala later joined another famous duo, Ustad Ghulam Hussein on the rebab, and Ustad Muhammad Asef Mahmud on the tabla. Afterward, Suphala stooped to kiss the hem of Ustad Asef, as the tabla master is also known.
"She has a good future," said Ustad Asef, himself a celebrated player, who has returned after 14 years in exile in London to teach at Kabul University for a year. "It's good she's here, in terms of art, but also because she is an international, and because she's a woman," he said.
Perhaps Dan lives by the beat of a different drum.
[/worldmusic forum]
i guess he couldn't spin it so he was bored with it...
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