Ravi Shankar: A Profile By MOHAN NADKARNI The Illustrated Weekly of India, September 25, 1955 RAVI SHANKAR, the famed sitar-player, ranks among the great musicians of today who have devoted their lives to the revival and enrichment of our traditional music with fresh inspiration. Scion of an aristocratic Bengali Brahmin family, 35-years-old Ravi Shankar is the youngest brother of the world-famous dancer, Uday Shankar....
By MOHAN NADKARNI The Economic Times, August 21, 1988 Gurudev Tagore had a world view of life. His genius therefore spanned a truly phenomenal range in creativity. And that is what rightly made him the most celebrated pioneer of creative music in modern times. Though Tagore’s music did fall outside the rigid traditional domain, it was certainly not wholly non-classical. What he conceived and...
Bhimsen Joshi is 75 MOHAN NADKARNI The Rediff.com Special, February 1996 He has never cared to hog the limelight. Quite to the contrary, the limelight keeps hogging him. A tribute to Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, the doyen of Hindustani classical music, on his 75th birthday, by Mohan Nadkarni, his biographer and wellknown critic. A jubilee year is rightly and understandably an event for rejoicing as much...
By MOHAN NADKARNI The Economic Times, August 27, 1989 With the death of the maestro, Krishnarao Shankar Pandit, 96, at Gwalior on August 22, an era of giants in Hindustani music has come to an end. He lived full of years and honours and loomed large on the concert scene for an incredible period of seven decades, as few else could. Raga and tala...
D V Paluskar – a tribute D.V. Paluskar participated in his first Music Conference when he was only 14. MOHAN D. NADKARNI The Illustrated Weekly of India, November 27, 1955 The sudden death, at 34, of Dattatraya Vishnu Paluskar is truly a national loss, coming as it did at a time when the older generation of giants in music is gradually dying out. Paluskar...
Crossing the Sound Barrier: Kumar Gandharva Prodigy, poet, innovator, rebel – Kumar Gandharva is all this and much more. Blazing new trails in the tradition – bound field of Indian classical music, he is one of the most controversial vocalists of our time. His genre, novel in form and unorthodox in approach, evokes extreme reactions – fanatical adulation from fans and consistent hostility from...