LAVANYA NARAYANAN
With an Air
of Mystique:
Flautists J.A. Jayanth
and Rasika Shekar On
Delving Into The World
of Bamboo and The
Scope of Flute Playing
It’s been a few decades since flautists J.A. Jayanth and
Rasika Shekar first took the stage. Bamboo flute in hand,
they presented the music they knew best, Carnatic music,
to the adulations of friends, family, relatives, and well-
wishers that would soon become some of their most avid
of rasikas. They called it the ‘pullankuzhal,’ or Carnatic
flute, and equipped with this seemingly small instrument,
they wove melodies in a variety of ragas, talas, and rasas.
Pretty soon, the young artists found themselves
drawn to sounds from Northern India and with
that, different types of flutes all together.
“The world of ghazals really fascinated me – the way in which
Hindustani artists express emotion and poetry in ghazals,
specifically. I was hooked,” Rasika smiles. A vocalist born and
bred in the U.S. with generations of musicians before her, she
found the system helpful in improving voice culture. Soon
enough, the emotive quality led her to the way she views music
now ¬– a large pool of different vocabularies, each a different
ornament used to display the same, artistic thought process.
Across the globe, Jayanth, a product of equally-impressive
lineage, found himself veering towards a similar system.
Exposed to the distinct tones of the bansuri – a longer, bamboo-
crafted flute used primarily in Hindustani music – through the
works of Pt. Hariprasad Chaurasia and Pt. Ronu Majumdar, he
found himself enamored by the deep, rich tone of the bass flute.
“I was in my teens when my flutemaker came home and,
as I can vividly remember, I asked him to make me a direct
double bass, D# flute. Flutemakers down South weren’t
acquainted with this type of flute whatsoever, so making
it was a process,” he laughs. Eventually, it’s become a
mainstay in many of his Carnatic concerts today, so much
so that photographers wait until the end just to capture
him playing an Aahir Bhairav on this rare instrument.
Their journeys couldn’t be more different. While
Jayanth is known primarily as a Carnatic flautist, the
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traditional kutcheri his medium through which he
expresses his music, Rasika has found her footing as a
collaborator. Her involvement with trio Shankar-Ehsaan-
Loy is probably the most notable, with a jugalbandhi
video of her mimicking Shankar’s vocalizations on the
flute continuing to go viral on global social media.
“The minute I started playing jazz, for instance,
or simply collaborating with other artists and
ensembles, I became sensitive to how my instrument
could respond to the occurrences around me. All of a
sudden, it became about musical conversation. Is this
translating what I’d like to convey?” she questions.
A valid question to ask, Jayanth notes, for interactions
abroad and careful study of other flutes such as the Japanese
shakuhachi have led him to his own path of inquisition.
“I’d call it an endless quest, to be honest – the more you
master your instrument, the more curious you become.
And the more you investigate, the more you realize how far
away you are from the benchmark you’re aiming to reach,”
he explains. It’s a quest that’s led him to experiment with
carbon fiber and glass, among a host of other variations.
And yet, after all is said and done, both artists say
that they can’t help but revisit their own collections
of bamboo flutes with renewed vigor.
“The bamboo is best suited to the type of music we represent,”
Jayanth says simply. This acknowledgement seems to be
what carries the two forward as they continue to innovate
with flutes of different lengths, breadths, and tonal qualities.
Of course, this begs the question, what
exactly are they searching for?
“Right now, it’s simply about self-expression,” Rasika
tells us. “What is the truth behind it, and how does the
ornamentation and technique of each genre feed into
the greater picture of expressing oneself musically?”