Mixing beats:
 World Music group Tambura Rasa blends cultures through melody
 
   by Alex Leslie Features editor of the Ubyssey Magazine (19. Nov 04)

It begins with a rhythmic drumming from the floor. The violin and guitar enter, then the bass. The violin embarks on a languid improvised solo and the guitar picks energetically to a growing beat. Meanwhile, the drum and bass are still pumping. Halt. Recollect. And go on.

The musicians are sitting in a circle facing each other, the guitarist, violinist and bass player in chairs while the drummer kneels on the ground. He is playing tablas, traditional Indian drums that he later tells me he began learning to play as a child. The music stops and is discussed. Should the tempo be faster? Beats are passed around the circle. The bassist plays a suggestion - “Did you want this?” The music starts up again, ascends, then dwindles again. The players are so highly attentive, the musical circle so tight in its intimate exchange of rhythm and melody, that I feel like an intruder.

The drummer stops to tell the others about something he remembers they did on the CD: leaving a space of silence after a dramatic swell, to leave the audience hanging. This is experimented with and soon the melody is swinging steadily, the bass player grinning as he crouches over his instrument and the drummer watching the others intensely, as if sensing the beats from their bodies. His small hands dance across the skins of the tablas. “If we get into this at the show, people are going to go nuts,” says the guitarist when they finish.

The guitarist is Ivan Tucakov, a UBC graduate and founder of the group. I’m here to watch the rehearsal of Tambura Rasa. The group is not present in its entirety. At their performance later this week, the four here will be joined by musicians playing the xiao, the diza, a Tibetan flute and a duduk—instruments from across the globe. Tambura Rasa is a World Music group, comprised of a revolving host of sounds from locales as varied and far-flung as India and China, western Africa and Tibet, Australia and Europe—an audio melting pot of cultures. Borders fade into one melody.

Sound fills the room once more. The Indian tablas on the floor intertwine with a rhythmic line from the electric bass and a liminal plucking from the guitar.

“Mixing cultures, it’s unpredictable what might come out,” Tucakov tells me later. “Of all the influences, something new gets built.”

Something out of nothing

Tambura Rasa began as a small group of UBC students with a common interest: playing music from different cultures. Tucakov studied physics and computers at UBC, while Tarun Nayar, Tambura Rasa’s drummer, graduated with a degree in oceanography. Tucakov met Nayar at a veggie lunch; the two began playing together, inviting other musicians to join them for jam sessions. Given UBC’s multicultural environment, the sounds that emerged hailed from several different countries and continents.

“To be honest, I think that the fact that I was at UBC exposed to so many different cultures [was the reason] that the whole think picked up,” Tucakov tells me. The group expanded as Tucakov and Nayar met and included other musicians from the Vancouver music scene. Expanding as an open collective of different cultures, the group erased the regular bounds of the Eastern and Western, the foreign and local, the modern and the classical. The group’s recent album, Sunrise on a New World, produced by Tucakov, included a didgeridoo, the vocals of a Guinean singer, and a Chinese flute played by a musician who has studied Gregorian chant and sung sacred polyphony in Churches.

Tucakov became exposed to different kinds of music while traveling, but did not find a community open to collaboration until he moved to Canada. In Portugal and Spain, he encountered an unwillingness to break musical boundaries. “People were really devoted to the music they play, and considering I’m a person who’s been exposed to a lot of different styles, if I tried to show them stuff that I know, they were not very interested,” he explains. “That’s where I noticed the close-mindedness kind of came from.”

In Canada, Tucakov found a change in climate, a greater openness among musicians to adopt other beats and contribute their own. The close-mindedness was no longer present. He attributes the difference partly to Canada’s relative youth in comparison to ancient cultures, such as those of India and China. Tambura Rasa thrived from this openness to the combination of cultures. “Where there’s world music, [people are] interested in doing music in a way where people can sit down and accept anyone to play whatever they bring in.”

A different drum

Tarun Nayar has played the tablas, or Indian traditional drums, since the age of seven, when his father gave him a choice between the tablas and the piano—he chose the piano, only to change his mind later on. The tablas date back 3000 years in India in the form of two small drums attached end-to-end, played from both sides. Nayar is classically trained in Indian music—being half Indian, his music is a touchstone of his personal sense of heritage.

Nayar’s interest in mixed music began at the age of 17 when he heard music that combined the influences of classical Indian music and electronica. The music had come out of the UK, where the younger generation of England’s large Indian population had appropriated traditional sounds to modern DJ beats. “About ten years ago they started putting together these crazy combinations of electronic music with Indian classical music,” he tells me, “that scene’s really evolved now.” Nayar now runs a DJ collective called Beats Without Borders that blends electronic music with Indian classical and performs in Vancouver clubs.

“I heard that music for the first time when I was 17 and all of a sudden I was, like, ‘this is what I like, I like this,’” he says enthusiastically. In Tambura Rasa, crossing cultures is accomplished in the tangible, but intangible, medium of music. “I think because I’m a mix, I’ve been mixing stuff up for my whole life. Because I’m half white, half Indian, I’ve been in these two different cultures, so other cultures I don’t think there’s much of a barrier.”

Beyond its personal significance, Nayar takes a larger message from the open cultural dialogue provided by groups like Tambura Rasa. “It goes beyond politics and talking about stuff, you can just play...one of the most beautiful things about this global sharing is new, common cultures.”

Fiddler on the loose

Music has often been said to be a carrier of culture. Every region, and era, has a sound specific to itself; on a smaller level, every community and individual has its own rhythm. Suzka Mares, Tambura Rasa’s violinist, recalls that the traditional role of fiddlers in Europe was to travel between communities, sharing stories through their music. “Their job was to travel around the world...that’s how you best learn stories.”

Like Tucakov, Mares came into contact with different forms of music through her travels. After graduating from university, she traveled for five years, living for nine months in the Middle East. Since returning to Canada, she has applied her experience of other cultures to several esoteric musical groups. Among them was an Aboriginal folk band, which participated in the first-ever indigenous peoples festival at the Plaza of Nations, and (wait for it) a Romanian gypsy swing band.

“I really believe that playing world music, you can fuse cultures and break down barriers,” she tells me. Echoing Tucakov, she explains that people have a tendency to become focused on their own culture, and that music permits for a peaceful, constructive meeting of differences. “You open up that door,” she says, holding her violin across her lap. “I really believe that playing world music you can fuse cultures and break down barriers.”

On the floor nearby, Nayar begins tapping quietly on his tablas.

A blank slate

After watching the rehearsal, I am intrigued by the process by which the music is made. None of the musicians read from sheet music; only the bassist follows his chords from an open binder. They watch each other closely as they play, moving fluidly through the different phases of the Latin-style melody. Occasionally, Tucakov shouts out a beat, or the playing halts for a quick discussion before the song resumes.

Tucakov later explains that the composition of the music operates with a large amount of flexibility, forming to suggestions from all sides, and assuming the different tones and nuances of the cultures at play. “Tarun will be on the tablas and do some progression and a lot of people are not accustomed to it...and they start picking it up. And then after a while everyone brings their own style and everyone starts picking up everyone else’s—and then all of a sudden we have this combination of different styles. We can still hear all the other styles within the songs, in different parts, yet a combination of them brings a completely new idea.”

The concept of world music is summed up in Tucakov’s explanation for the name of the band. Tambura Rasa is drawn from two elements: the expression tabla rasa, and the meaning of the word “tambura.” Tabla rasa is the idea that when a person is born, their mind is clean—they are formed completely by the influences, positive and negative, of their life. “Tambura” has several different meanings: guitar, lute (a string instrument common throughout Asia and Europe), a joyful dance and, in Hindi, flavour or taste. “Tambura Rasa means having that clean approach to whatever comes out of my guitar, and to add any other musical style into it,” Tucakov concludes.

Since graduating from UBC, Tucakov has made Tambura Rasa his primary focus, despite having obtained his degree in physics and computer science. “People think ‘I have to focus on [university], I have to get my career going, otherwise I’m going to fail...because the overall atmosphere, it can be intense, stressful and everyone feels like they need to keep up, which is not true at all,” he tells me. “You can just relax and do what you feel like doing.

“Get involved in other forms of music, new forms of music, see what there is out there.”