Pandit Pran Nath
The focus on the sitar may have been part of the problem, as the music of India is at heart a vocal music. In the 90s a new wave of ancient music with Indian origins hit our shores–the qawwali style, sung most famously by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan–and it had more soul than instrumental sitar ragas. Developed in 13th-century Delhi alongside Hindustani music, qawwali is today associated with Muslim Pakistan, but it demarcates the most upbeat extreme of Indian music, with its strong hand-clapped backbeat and extroverted, emotional vocals. Tibetan Buddhist chant and Tuvan throat singing have also sparked Western interest, because both require almost superhuman control of pitch and overtones. But nowhere has this control been taken to as high an art as in the singing of Indian ragas.
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A particularly thrilling example of this beauty and control is Midnight/Raga Malkauns, a newly released set of recordings of the late Pandit Pran Nath singing Raga Malkauns in San Francisco in ’71 and SoHo in ’76. (Ragas typically specify the time of day they are to be performed and heard, and Malkauns is a raga to be sung at midnight.) The singer lingers long in the alap–the long, unmetered opening section–his dark mahogany voice shivering with overtones. Roland Barthes wrote about “the grain of the voice,” something “brought by one and the same movement to your ear from the depth of the body’s cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilage…as if a single skin lined the performer’s inner flesh and the music he sings.” Over the course of these two performances, which last 40 and 60 minutes, Nath carefully unfolds from his resonant cavities yards and yards of gorgeous marbled music so thin it’s translucent.
In the late 60s Young and Riley were already well-established composers with major works under their belts. But upon hearing a recording of Nath in 1967, Young felt his control of tone was so impressive and so in line with what he was working on that he had to persuade the man to come to New York and teach him. Nath also tutored Riley and a host of other minimalist composers including Jon Hassell, Henry Flynt, Arnold Dreyblatt, and Charlemagne Palestine, essentially recalibrating the entire movement. Of course getting yourself a guru was then endemic among musicians in rock, jazz, and fusion circles, but the Nath setup was unique in the specifically musical knowledge being imparted and the degree to which the students have expressed what they learned in their own work. Hassell and Flynt in particular practically constitute a subgenre you could call Pran Nath minimalism.
The mythology around Nath’s presence in New York is most explicitly given voice by Marcus Boon in “Pandit Pran Nath: Infinity’s Pathfinder,” a version of which ran in the Wire in September 2001. To read this piece, you’d think that when Nath left India it was like Elvis left the building. “No Indian music sounds like Young’s 1970’s recordings of Pran Nath,” writes Boon. “The droning tamburas are located high in the mix, as loud, rich and powerful as vintage Theater of Eternal Music…. The tabla playing is simple but tough.” It’s clearly implied by Boon’s reverent tone that if no Indian music sounds like this, that can’t be good for Indian music.
