Moodbidri: The second day of the Alva’s Virasat 2015, a pleasant evening witnessed a magnificent collaboration of eastern and western music, ‘String Struck’ in the palace ground, vidyagiri here on January 9.
Amazing journey of music began with the raga ‘shree’ enriching the beauty of dusk. Sitar by Purbayan Chatterjee hit the soul of the audience. Taufiq Qureshi by his magical hands on drums made the crowd spellbound. While Aditya kalyanpur, Sridhar Parthasarathi performed a class wizarding music in Tabla and Mridangam.
On contrary Atul Raninga and Deepak Pandit presented their excellence in Keyboard and Violin. Vocalist Kshitij Tarey added more melody to the journey of Music. Fabulous piece “Lullaboy” recalled the innocence of a kid. Taufiq’s excellence in creating music by various sounds by mouth, created an obsession in the gathering. The journey ended with the astonishing popular songs like ‘Raghupathiraghava Rajaram’, ‘Sare Jahase Accha’ and Vande Mataram’.
Music is the language of the soul. And when u add instruments to speak this music, it adds a mystical quality to this experience. It turns into a magical moment in time. The magicians have turned an ordinary musical instrument into something surreal.
Anandan Sivamani
He is the son of S M Anandan, a Chennai based Percussionist. He began drumming at the age of 7. He is an enthusiastic ambassador for drum around India and the globe. He plays many instruments including drums, octoban , darbuka, udukai and kanjira. He gained recognition through his role as A. R. Rahman’s lead percussionist.
Sivamani’s early experiments with music carnatic maestro including Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan T.V.Gopalakrishnan, Valliyapatti Subramaniam and Pazhanivel and L. Shankar, The table player Zakir Hussain invited him to share the stage with himself and trilok gurtu at a fusion concert in Mumbai.
Sivamani has a band called “Asia Electrik” with Niladri kumar, Louiz Banks and Ravi Chari. He also plays music in another music band known as Silk and Shrada. Sivamani is the recipient of Kalaimamani award in 2009 and since then he is popularly known as Kalaimamani Sivamani.
Bala Bhaskar
Born on 10th July 1978. He is an Indian violinist composer and record producer. He is best known for promoting fusion music in south India.
He was introduced to the world of instrumental music at the age of 3 by his uncle Shri. Sasi kumar, a laureate in music. He is the youngest music director in the Malayalam film industry at the age of !7. Bala Bhaskar has performed with many noted musician and instrumentalist in India and abroad including Ustad Zakeer Hussain Sivamani Vikku Vinayak Rao Hari Haran LOUIZ BANKS Mattannur Shankarankutty Ranjith Barot Faisal Qureshi and so on.
He is the recipient of Bismillah Khan yuva sangeetkar puraskar in 2008 by Kendra sangeeth natak academy for instrumental music.
Stephen Devassy
He is a musician who started his career at an early age around the world. He holds a record as Asia’s highest scorer solo piano exams from Trinity college of music London with the score of 92.2 %. He also holds the record of completing the course in three years of time. Devassy’s first major break came when he was aged 18 through Johnny Sagarika for whom he did the music orchestration of 6 songs on the Album Istamannu. Some of the films he recorded were Majaa, Thambi, Nammal, Azhagiya Thamizh Magan and Hariharan’s album was his maiden music directorial venture in Malayalam.
He is one of the regular band member in Rex band Christian contemporary band singing gospel fusion a musical outrage of the Jesus youth movement. He performed with the band before pope john 2nd during the world youth day performance in 2002 at Canada. He has also assisted Sarod maestro Amjad Ali Khan with his album of Christian carols Breaking Barriers.
He appears As pianist in popular music show in Mazhavi Manaroma tv channel.