It was an all-music day today. First we had the all-station meeting for WXDU. These meetings are always pretty boring, but I can't complain because the last two times I got lucky and the meeting was scheduled during my show. This time it was two hours before my show, so at least I got to leave after an hour (on the grounds that I had to walk over to the station and do the op log before my show started).
I had a really fun show today. Lots of calls and notes to the request line, including one person who normally writes every week, but I hadn't heard from in a long time and I was honestly a bit worried about them. Well, they explained that they had been out of town for an extended stay with family. So glad to hear that they're okay. I also got calls from a couple of people I had never heard from before which is always nice. My only disappointment was that I couldn't fill one of the requests. It was a specific Duke Ellington tune called "A Rose of the Rio Grande" and neither the station nor I have it. I played several Ellington tracks that were recorded in the same year to make it up to him.
Then after dinner we went to a concert at Duke. It was classical Indian music, Pandit Shivkumar Sharma on santoor, a stringed instrument, & Zakir Hussain on tabla. I don't know much about classical Indian music, but according to the program they are considered the world's leading performers on their respective instruments. And it showed. It was truly a virtuoso performance. The part that blew my mind was that, in the introduction, Sharma explained that their performances are totally improvised. They don't rehearse or even discuss what they're going to play. Yet they were completely in harmony. They played two pieces: each time Sharma announced the basic structure they were going to play, then he played a short solo meditation on the theme, then they played together. It seemed to me that Hussain found out what he was going to be playing at the same time we did.
One of the most interesting parts (okay, if you're a geek) was watching an assistant tune one of the tablas before the concert started. It involves tapping the rim of the drumhead with a small hammer, either from the top or the underside. Then he pulled a string out of the drumhead, then used something that looked like a dull knife to push another string in, around the edge. Finally he hid the extra string under the carpet. I wish he had explained what he was doing as I had no idea what was up with the string. Later on, during the concert several times Hussain had to retune it while he was playing. Somehow they managed to incorporate the tapping with the hammer into the piece. It was incredible.
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