Flautist Rakesh Chaurasia on handling a heavy-duty surname, blowing life into a bamboo reed and being a classical musician in contemporary times | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Flautist Rakesh Chaurasia on handling a heavy-duty surname, blowing life into a bamboo reed and being a classical musician in contemporary times | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Written by Suanshu Khurana |Updated: June 26, 2019 8:14:53 am

Flautist Rakesh Chaurasia on handling a heavy-duty surname, blowing life into a bamboo reed and being a classical musician in contemporary times

Rakesh Chaurasia was four when he was captivated by the swirling sounds from the flute. His uncle (father’s brother), Pt Hari Prasad Chaurasia, was at the peak of his career then, and Rakesh heard the warm notes being created by breathing life into a bamboo reed. “

“I like to experiment with fusing various instruments. It allows me to connect with different kinds of audience,” says Rakesh, who recently toured the East Coast with tabla maestro Ut Zakir Hussain, legendary American bassist and composer Edgar Meyer and 16-time Grammy-winning American banjoist Bela Fleck.

In a concert presented last weekend as part of the HCL concert series at Shiv Nadar School’s auditorium in Gurgaon, to commemorate World Music Day (June 21), flautist Rakesh Chaurasia seemed quite perplexed on stage. The displeasure seemed to be arising from drowning of the flute’s sound alongside that of five other instruments. With Ut Fazal Qureshi on the tabla, Purbayan Chatterjee on the sitar, Gino Banks on the drums, Sangeet Haldipur on the keys and Rickraj Nath on the guitar, a bamboo reed can easily get overshadowed. Chatterjee kept asking for more sound in his monitors and so did Qureshi. “Flautists usually suffer because of the pitch. When we do a collaboration, we have a bit of a hard time. It’s a completely acoustic instrument among many amplified instruments and doesn’t have any resonance. We don’t have that pick up to keep up with the drums, the sitar and so on. The flute has to work harder than the others,” says Rakesh, 48. To stand out in a space that was “not a proper auditorium”, he played his heart out — be it a soothing piece in raag Ahir Bhairav that made its mark for its meditative tune or breaking the norm and having a bit of unconventional fun on stage by playing the Pink Panther theme song and Nokiaringtone in a semi-classical concert.