Ustad Salamat Ali Khan, Camaron de la Isla, and Ustad Shafqat Ali Khan. With Glenn Spearman, Dhyani Dharma Mas, Paco de Lucia and Tomatito.
Great souls bond across space and time.
Brothers in Duende
Ustad Salamat Ali Khan and Camaron de la Isla, two of any century, sound like brothers of the soul.
The two are separated at their roots by more than 4000 miles. They're also a generation apart, Salamat born in 1934, Camaron in 1950. Yet both issue from an expressive tradition, a tradition of "deep song" and duende, that has carried from northern India to southern Spain
Their voices cross Continents as if they come from a shared heart.
Ustad Salamat Ali Khan and his slightly older brother Ustad Nazakat Ali Khan were child prodigies before India's partition. Trained from their infancy onward by their father Vilayat, they inherited the 400-year-old Shamchaurasi gharana mode of classical Indian singing. Ancestors of theirs began to perform the Shamchaurasi gharana of narrative song in the 16th century court of Akbar the Great. Salamat and Nazakat became famous in 1945, when they were aged 11 and 13 respectively, at a mehfil (concert) in Lahore.
The musicologist M. A. Sheikh remembers this concert: 'When the performance started, it seemed like a feast of musical notes had descended upon us in the audience. Every member of the audience was amazed and in complete awe of the duo. It was almost unbelievable that boys of that age could give such a fine performance. When the drut portion started, the brothers gave a blazing display of taans, sargams and layakari, which left the audience stunned.'
Please see M. A. Sheikh's very fond and insightful appreciation of his long-time friend Ustad Salamat at http://www.sadarang.com/Yaadein-SalamatNazakat.htm.
A more extensive biography of Salamat is at http://www.sadarang.com/Ustad%20salamat%20ali %20khan.htm
The brothers, Nazakat and Salamat, went on to high acclaim across the sub-continent, before and after 1947's partition made Islamic Pakistan. They soon won the honorific Ustad--meaning a master of their art--for their accomplishments.
You can hear Ustad Salamat's voice deliver the fantastically nuanced khayal in Satyajit Ray's "The Music Room" (1958).
The brothers continued as a duo till they parted ways in 1974. Nazakat built further on the conceptual (ragarup) part of the Shamchaurasi gharana, dying in 1983, (1) while Salamat brought a succession of his sons into his international performances (2).
In 1995 I met Ustad Salamat and his sons Sukhawat and Shafqat and his daughter Rifat in San Francisco. Our connection was Shantee Baker Spearman, wife of my friend the composer and tenor-saxophonist Glenn Spearman; Shantee had met the Ali Khan family during her stay in India. Soon afterward the whole lot of us—Gleen, Shantee, Gina Jacupke, and me—were having meals together and planning an album.
The group that formed we named Urna, the Urdu word for flight. Glenn Spearman (3) was joined by another tremendous musician, Dhyani Dharma (4), on guitar as Urna's fourth principal. We added John Baker on keyboards, Zeke Neely on congas, Tim Witter on tabla, and Rifat Ali Khan on tamboura. The album, Journey To The Beloved, recorded in June 1995, combined motifs of three songs made famous by artists of the 20th-century West, "Crossroads" by Robert Johnson, "Solitude" by Billie Holiday, and "Redemption Song" by Bob Marley, with ragas.
Its five tracks of music and singing relate love-story stages that are especially pronounced in the north Indian tradition. The stages are: lovers are in crisis: they separate; they yearn for each other in isolation; they pursue reunion; they come together. Ustad Salamat's singing in the nearly 20 minutes of Urna's "Solitude" is among the greatest vocal performance I've ever heard. To me, it raises hairs like the voices of Blind Willie Johnson, Laura Nyro, Laurence Olivier as Richard III.
One of my fondest memories from this mid-1990s time is going with Ustad Salamat to San Francisco's De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. I thought that he might enjoy an exhibition whose theme was something like 'Art in the American Home: From the Colonies Onward.' Something like that.
He and I walked from Gallery to Gallery. We stopped to gaze at oil-painting portraits after Reynolds and Gainsborough. We viewed many gentlemen on horses. Likewise, many ladies under brocades. Many, too, were the rosy-cheeked children of Manors.
We were into our eighth or ninth Room of such scenes. Salamat turned to me with a quizzical—almost a pained—look on the beautifully rounded symmetries of his 61-year-old face.
"Where are the musicians?" he asked.
He could not imagine a nation’s cultural history without musicians integral to that story.
Outside the de Young, contemplating the musicians missing in that Museum.
Dhyani Dharma Mas, who learned 72 ragas in two months before we recorded the Urna album.
From India to Spain
The movie "Latcho Drom" traces connections between so-called Gypsies' musical cultures across continents. The movie travels from northern India to Central Asia and Istanbul--then to Romania--then to France--and finally to Spain.
"Latcho Drom", filmed in 1992-1993 by the Algerian/French/Roma director Tony Gatlif, is a rich and touching trip. In it it you can hear singing very like the Bauls of Bengal--very like a Muslim muezzin's calls to prayer--very like the nuances and passions of gharana, khayal, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's qawwali-- and also like Appalachia's Ralph Stanley and Hazel Dickens--and also like Egypt's Om Khalsoum.
For me, the strongest and starkest genre-likeness to "Latcho Drom's" beginning in northern India arrives with the movie's conclusion in flamenco of Spain.
Spain. The singer Camaron de la Isla and the guitarist Paco De Lucia grew up in Cadiz, the southernmost province of Spain and thus the province of Spain nearest both Gibralter and moorish Africa.
Camaron was born Jose Monge Cruz, the son of a Roma singer and blacksmith who nicknamed him for his fair hair and complexion and spindling size. That is, Camaron de la Isla is Shrimp of the Island. Names may be impetus for a person to grow giant.
Paco de Lucia's father was not Roma but was nonetheless devoted to flamenco. He had Paco practice up to 12 hours a day. The teen-agers met at a music-academy in Madrid, the Tablao Torres Bermejas, Paco de Lucia three years Camaron's senior.
Each discovered what the other could bring to his love for music. They began the process that led to re-invigorating and expanding a tradition that's likely old as inhabitants in the Indus Valley. They evolved what became named 'Nuevo Flamenco.'
The pair recorded at least eight albums between 1969 and 1977, most of the early LPs untitled, and then they, too, like Ustad Salamat and Ustad Nazakat, parted ways. (5)
Paco de Lucia went on to join the first Guitar Trio with Larry Coryell and John McLaughlin. The group brought out an album in 1979. Al Di Meola later replaced Larry Coryell and three more Guitar Trio albums followed. (6)
Camaron chose a student of Paco's, Tomatito (born Jose Fernandez), a fellow Roma, as his next and final guitarist. The new pair performed together into 1992.
Camaron's own broadening extended to 'progressive Rock' (Sandcastle) and to recording with London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He had a Pop hit in 1979 with "Voy Volando".
Camaron's forte remained his roots. The album Flamenco en Vivo (1987) exemplified his strengths in 'Cante Jondo' (deep song), in leaps and barks of melody, and in rhythmic stutters borne from childhood-heard martinetes (work songs) of laborers and vendors in Cadiz streets. His voice also grew from the woman whom he married when she was 16, Dolores Montoya, "la Chispa" (the Spark), and his fathering four children with her.
In May of 1992 Camaron and Paco de Lucia and Tomatito reunited to record the album 'Potro del Robia y Miel''--'Colt (or Heroine) of Rage and Honey. The combination is concatenaton of phenomenal energy and the guitarists together help to drive and reveal the sincerity and sweetness in Camaron's singing.
Camaron died just two months later. Chain-smoking along with the highs and lows of narcotics finally wasted his health. (7) He passed on July 7, 2002, Intensive Care in a Barcelona hospital unable to treat his lung cancer.
His funeral in the Catalonia that had adopted him, one month before that year's Summer Olympics, drew more than 100,000. James Kirkup wrote an insightful obituary for the British Independent (8)
Ustad Shafqat Ali Khan and Fires Tens of Millions Views Strong
Federico Garcia Lorca's essay from more than 90 years ago, 'Theory and Play of Duende' speaks a language kindred to the Ali Khan singers and to Camaron, Paco de Lucia, and Tomatito.
Lorca's 1933 lecture to a Buenos Aires' audience is included in the indelible collection, Poetics of the New American Poetry, edited by Don Allen and Warren Tallman, that’s itself 50 years’ vintage . A 2007 translation by A.S. Kline is available online at http:// www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/LorcaDuende.htm
Lorca (who would be murdered in Spain three years after his Buenos Aires' lecture) swirls like a dancer through suggestions of what duende may be or mean. Duende, he asserts, intrinsically abides in 'the buried spirit of saddened Spain.' Duende of necessity must be colored by the 'dark sounds' identified by the wise Manuel Torres. And duende is as Goethe described affects of Paganini the composer and violinist: it's the 'force everyone feels and no philosopher has explained.
Lorca refers to 'an old maestro of the guitar' for a palpable summation of where and how this earthly mystery, this affecting force and power, arises: ' "The duende is not in the throat; the duende surges up, insidc, from the souls of the feet." '
Duende might be defined by many audiences as Soul. It might also named as the Demon or Daemon which empowers Soul.
Ustad Salamat’s youngest son is now accorded the honorific, Ustad. Ustad Shafqat was a mere 23 when we recorded Urna’s album Journey To The Beloved.
Please check out Ustad Shafqat with his father and another master, the superlative tabla-player,Ustad Tari Ali Khan. The visual quality of the video is like crepe-gone-to-mad=tatters, but the musicians’ high spirits and affection and surprises for each other lift everything.
Ustad Shafqat in Lahore, Pakistan, 2019, entrances a theater’s audience with melodies ever extending.
In 2021 Ustad Shafqat Ali Khan and Ustad Shafqat Amanat sang with the Budapest Symphony Orchestra in a melding of compositions by their fathers. One Comment: ‘A prideful moment for Late Ustad Salamat Ali Khan and Late Ustad Asad Amanat Ali Khan. What a performance and rendition from Sham Churasi and Patiala gharana!! This is music at its best. These are living legends who give music a language that is felt yet can't be explained.’ This video has 13 million Views.
Ustad Salamat teaches a table-full of students with soaring emphases and charming smiles.
We return to Camaron and Tomatito. Shakespeare and D. H. Lawrence both exclaimed on the bonds between great souls. ‘The only riches, the great souls,’ Lawrence wrote.
I remember Ustad Salamat for Pakistani TV in 2012, Video shot by Maryse.
1. http://www.archive-icm.org/nazakatalikhan.htm
2. http://www.sadarang.com/Ustad%20salamat%20ali%20khan.htm
3. http://www.bb10k.com/SPEARMAN.disc.html
4. http://dhyanidharma.com/bio.htm
5. http://afrocubanlatinjazz4.blogspot.com/2010/07/camaron-de-la-isla-con-paco-de-lucia.html
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paco_de_Luc%C3%AD
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camarón_de_la_Isla ,http://www.flamenco-world.com/magazine/ camaron/camaron.htm
8. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-camaron-de-la-isla-1531654.html