havanurmic's video: Call of the Silicon Valley - Warren Senders sings Bhairavi

Warren Senders is a talented composer/musician who has studied and rendered Hindustani music for over 20 years. " I was introduced through a friend who had a source for free records ... among them was a record with a short bit of Hindustani style singing. I was captivated and made up my mind that I wanted to learn to do THAT! Very fortunately I met my first teacher, Kalpana Mazumder, shortly after that. I studied with her for the next eight years, gradually working out all the kinks and problems with my voice, and laying the foundation for a deeper musical study once I went to India. It was my great good fortune that I met Pandit Shreeram Devasthali in the second half of 1986. From there I guess you can say that my life as a Hindustani musician, as a khyal singer, really began. He took me on as a student and began devoting all his spare time to teaching me. And when I say "all his spare time," I mean about four hours a day, every day. No vacations or weekends. He had a most extraordinary focus of attention, so spending that long a time with him was a totally life-changing experience. It was not a group class; it started with just the two of us. After a little while my then-fiancee (now my wife) Vijaya joined us. She had a firm musical knowledge base, which meant that a lot of the stuff I was struggling with she was able to parse relatively quickly. This was deeply helpful. Pt. Devasthali was one of the most generous people I've ever met, and one of the most demanding. I know that sounds like a contradiction. But the thing was, he'd spend all this time singing with me -- hours and hours and hours. If I brought up the subject of money, he would refuse to talk about it. He would get very upset if I wanted to pay him, and for several years it was very hard even to get him to accept the ritually mandated gifts which a disciple is expected to give his or her guru on certain auspicious days. So his teaching was not measured on a scale that had any points in common with a set of fiscal values, and he never rationed his time in any way. In that sense he was deeply generous. But his demands were very severe. If I wanted the musical knowledge and experience he had to give, he would give it unstintingly, but I had to practice incredibly hard. If he taught me for four hours, that meant eight hours of practice in order to stay on top of the material! So basically it was a situation where khyal singing completely took over my life most of the time. I'd get up at six am, make and drink an entire pot of espresso, and sit down to practice until ten or eleven. Then get up, have lunch, take a walk, and then practice some more in the afternoon, and go out and run my errands, come home, practice some more, go off to a seven o'clock lesson and return at around eleven, with my head completely spinning, full of music." More about Warren at http://www.warrensenders.com/ Here he concludes with "baju band khul khul" in Bhairavi, accompanied by William Rossel on tabla and Ramakant Paranjape on violin