Onstage at Ragamala 2018, from left: Ganapathi Ranganathan on kanjira, Patri Satish Kumar on mridangam, and Saraswathi Ranganathan on veena Credit: Courtesy of the City of Chicago
In fall 2013, Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events kicked off its annual World Music Festival with an ambitious new program: an overnight celebration of Indian classical music called Ragamala. According to Ragamala cofounder and DCASE performing arts programmer Carlos Cuauhtémoc Tortolero, the event drew enthusiastic crowds from the jump. In the years since, it’s become a beloved institution.
Ragamala’s usual home, the Chicago Cultural Center’s Preston Bradley Hall, holds around 600 people when it’s filled with chairs for a concert, and Ragamala can fit maybe 800 at a time because listeners also like to sit on the floor or lie on mats, blankets, and sleeping bags. Total attendance averages 2,500 to 3,000 due to turnover as people come and go throughout the 14 hours of the event. Even the 24-hour Ragas Live Festival in Brooklyn, a ticketed concert, only draws around 1,500 people—Ragamala is one of the most popular marathons of Indian classical music in the States in part because it’s completely free.
Ragamala: A Celebration of Indian Classical Music
Presented by DCASE in collaboration with the South Asia Institute and South Asian Classical Music Society–Chicago. Emceed by Brian Keigher from People of Rhythm Productions. Fri 9/20–Sat 9/21, 6 PM–8 AM, Preston Bradley Hall, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, third floor, all ages
The artists at Ragamala practice both of the major traditions in contemporary Indian classical music, Hindustani (from the north of the country) and Carnatic (from the south), honoring the long history of cultural plurality that continues to shape the art form. Ragamala has presented some of the most renowned artists in both traditions, so that the event can be just as exciting for the performers as it is for the audience—especially the performers in a position to feel legitimized by such exalted company. “For me, it was kind of like, ‘Wow, I’m being seen as someone who can share a bill with these artists,’” says bicoastal Carnatic vocalist Roopa Mahadevan. “That was a boost for me. It was also nice to be seen as an ambassador of this movement.”
For this brief oral history of Ragamala, I talked to ten people—performers, fans, organizers, and other staff—who’ve had a hand in making it a cornerstone of the World Music Festival. According to Ragamala cofounder Brian Keigher (also executive director of the South Asia Institute and a programmer with People of Rhythm Productions), over the years the event has presented a grand total of 141 musicians and dancers, solo or in combination. And when you consider that it’s booked 25 artists for 2024 alone, you’ll get some idea how many have made repeat visits—another factor that helps Ragamala feel like a community.
Within the parameters I’d set for myself, I tried to cast a wide net. I spoke to Hindustani slide-guitar maestro Debashish Bhattacharya, who performs at this year’s Ragamala on a tour for his new album, Legacy, with his daughter Anandi and his younger brother, Subhasis. Chicago-based vocalist Ashwin Rode will make his Ragamala debut next week, after faithfully attending the event for years; he and longtime fan Laurie Nelson, who sketches the musicians as they play, talked to me about their time in the audience. Carnatic violinist Ganesh Rajagopalan (who shared a Grammy for Best Global Music Album earlier this year) is the third and final 2024 Ragamala performer among my interviewees. I also talked to Carnatic violinist Sruti Sarathy, who performed with Roopa Mahadevan in 2022 and debuted her trio Unfretted last year; veteran Chicago veena player Saraswathi Ranganathan, who’s appeared at almost every Ragamala; and Radio Outernational bassist Wayne Montana, who’s worked the event as a sound tech for nearly a decade.
Carlos Cuauhtémoc Tortolero I remember coming into this role as a programmer of the World Music Festival and thinking, “How could we elevate the festival and create something different and exciting?” Brian Keigher has been a very good friend and colleague of mine over the years, and it’s with Brian where I started doing Indian classical music programming. We have a long track record of doing it within the festival. We were trying to navigate ways to continue to highlight that genre.
Brian Keigher Years ago [in 2007 and 2008], there was a program called Looptopia, based on a program in Paris; a lot of the institutions were supposed to stay open all night. That was part of the inspiration, like, “Oh, there’s places that will actually stay open all night.”
Carlos Cuauhtémoc Tortolero I was at his house, at his apartment, and we’re brainstorming and listening to music. We started talking about how it’s tradition in India—or it’s popular tradition—to have multiday, all-night Indian classical music presentations. I thought that format was really appealing.
Brian Keigher In India, there’s a handful of festivals that go on all night, similar to this—and with Hindustani classical more so than Carnatic classical, those ragas are meant for a specific time of the day or night. So it’s rare that some of these ragas that were meant for a specific time of the day get performed, because concerts are usually at seven or eight at night. So it was a rare opportunity to showcase some of these rare ragas and get artists to perform music that they rarely get to play onstage.
Saraswathi Ranganathan I was telling Brian, “Oh my god, you’re helping put together Carnatic music here?” ’Cause it’s always Hindustani music. Wherever I take this instrument, people are like, “Is that a sitar? I know Ravi Shankar.” It’s always going in that direction. So I’m like, “OK, now here’s an opportunity to showcase the ancestor of the sitar, which is the veena.”
Carlos Cuauhtémoc Tortolero Getting approval to have the Cultural Center open after hours took some convincing. I was very appreciative to the then commissioner, Michelle Boone, for being receptive to the idea, because it was a bit out-there in terms of city presentation and how we normally have done things.
Amjad Ali Khan and his sons, Amaan and Ayaan, perform at Pritzker Pavilion as part of the first Ragamala in 2013.
Brian Keigher I partnered with Carlos to do Ragamala as part of the World Music Festival, so we were able to pull it off. We put a big-name artist onstage at Millennium Park and then continued on with the all-night program at the Chicago Cultural Center.
Debashish Bhattacharya It’s one of the very important performing spaces for Indian classical music overseas—especially in America, where all-night concerts were not much before around that time. This was the first thing I played for that big venue—the open theater [Pritzker Pavilion]. Beautiful.
Brian Keigher We had Amjad Ali Khan, who’s a major sarod artist, and we had Debashish Bhattacharya, who is a major, Grammy-nominated slide guitarist. They were probably the third-ever South Asian classical music concert to happen at Millennium Park, which was exciting. We had about 8,000 or 9,000 people over at Millennium Park for the concert. We could actually invite—or remind folks—to just go across the street afterwards, [where] the music continued.
Carlos Cuauhtémoc Tortolero After that initial experience in 2013, we achieved our goal of convincing leadership that this was something we should do annually and that we should commit to doing. It’s a well-anticipated event; it’s one of the bigger showcases that we produce at World Music Fest.
The 2023 version of Ragamala included a concurrent livestream.
Brian Keigher It’s free and open to the public, thanks to DCASE, and it’s an amazing opportunity for folks to get interested in this music without having to spend a ton of money on going to see maybe Zakir [Hussain] or Anoushka [Shankar] at the Symphony Center or going to another concert in the south suburbs.
Ganesh Rajagopalan The South Indian community, they have quite a big festival called Chicago Tyagaraja Utsavam [in Lemont], which is done in May every year. I’ve performed quite a lot, and otherwise there are other temples and organizations that I’ve performed for near Naperville—more like that, not in downtown Chicago.
Roopa Mahadevan So much of Indian classical music [in the U.S.] is still restricted to the cultural communities that the music comes from—where they live and how they socialize. It’s rare to hear Indian music in a city atmosphere. A lot of it happens in the suburbs, where South Asians generally tend to live, in rented high school auditoriums or smaller theaters—and usually those are attended only by people of that culture. It’s an important function, in terms of helping immigrants feel connected in the States and rooted to their homeland but also developing community. I think it’s an important role that it plays for those communities, but it’s rarer to see it presented in an urban atmosphere.
Brian Keigher As far as getting all the artists booked, it’s always a puzzle: looking internationally, who’s coming from abroad, who’s here nationally, and then who’s here locally to showcase.
Indrajit Banerjee, Rupak Kulkarni, and Hindole Majumdar (behind Kulkarni) at Ragamala 2022 Credit: Brian Keigher
Saraswathi Ranganathan There was talk about how we nurture Chicago artists too, every year, in addition to the others that we’re inviting; we want to see homegrown artists featured in Ragamala, aside from the other global artists. I think that’s a welcome change, to have our own artists being nurtured on a global platform. That’s actually wonderful.
Ashwin Rode I moved here from California. I moved in late summer [of 2014], and this thing was happening within a few weeks of my arrival. It seemed really amazing that Chicago supported such an event as part of its World Music Festival. So that was the first time I attended.
Saraswathi Ranganathan Initially the Carnatic musicians were very few. The Carnatic segments were few—like, one or two—and then the rest of them were the Hindustani artists. But then over the years we have had more presentations of Carnatic music. And then we have had instrumental presentations.
Brian Keigher Sometimes we’d hire dancers and have a dance ensemble and music ensemble, ’cause sometimes dance will go with Indian classical music.
Sruti Sarathy You can play your set, and then you have time to listen to not just one or two [sets], but you can spend the whole night there and experience a lot of different music.
Ashwin Rode I didn’t make it through the whole night, but I stayed quite late. I actually came back for the last set, I remember, because the closing performer that year was Tapan Bhattacharya, who is a resident of Chicago, and who I had actually studied with earlier.
Wayne Montana As the evening goes on, people are lying down and spreading out, and some people are falling asleep. It’s not like any kind of concert that I had ever witnessed before.
Laurie Nelson The first time I came, I saw that people brought sleeping bags and pillows, ’cause some people come and sleep for part of it, then wake up and listen to more. So I brought a pillow and stuff, but it turns out I didn’t want to go to sleep—I didn’t want to miss anything, so I just stayed up all night. Afterwards you get, like, a second wind. One time, after staying up all night, I went to walk on the lakefront.
A clip of Saraswathi Ranganathan’s performance with Ganapathi Ranganathan and Patri Satish Kumar in 2018
Ashwin Rode There’s an increasing core of people who really do stay through the night or stay through those really early morning concerts. For this to work, it requires not just the artists and the organizers but the audience [to have] that same level of dedication and commitment to the event. That’s been, if anything, growing over the years as the event establishes itself.
Roopa Mahadevan [My] first one, I think my slot was 3 AM. It was a unique experience, in the sense that I had never done a public show at that odd of an hour. It’s probably the worst time of day to do anything. You kind of become a little nocturnal and sleep during the day and prep. But there was something electric about that: seeing the crowd and how committed people were to be there for 3 AM. I really appreciated that. Surprisingly, my mind cooperated for the most part. I think I was probably a little groggy and maybe not at peak performance, but I think it’s sometimes fun to do things you’ve never done before.
Sruti Sarathy I definitely remember one of the years—a friend and I, I think we [performed] relatively early on in the night, and then we stayed up through the whole thing. There’s the dome in that space, where it gets lighter—I remember very clearly from that night, as the sun rises, it gets lighter, and you can see the light filter in.
Carlos Cuauhtémoc Tortolero We have the largest Tiffany dome ceiling in the world. When we turn off all the lights and it’s completely dark, and you have that dome naturally illuminated by the sunlight, it’s just one of those moments that really just makes you smile and appreciate life and all that it has. To have music accompany that experience—and music that is intentionally composed for that hour—it’s just an organic pairing that’s hard to describe.
Debashish Bhattacharya [Performing] in this beautiful dome, with my sister and my brother, that was awesome. I performed in many India festivals in midnight concerts. Getting the opportunity to play in a midnight concert anywhere else than in India, that was an American festival—that was the first festival I think I performed. It was an awesome feeling, and I still feel it; it’s a golden memory.
Wayne Montana The whole audience is sitting, literally, three feet away from the stage. That’s another aspect of it that’s cool; it’s really, like, close. The stage is very low—I think it’s a 16-inch-high stage. People are sitting in chairs that are normal chairs, so they’re often above the musicians, ’cause no one’s sitting up on chairs on the stage. Everyone’s sitting kinda lower than the audience. It’s the only music fest I’ve ever done that is that style.
Chicago veena player Saraswathi Ranganathan sketched by Ragamala fan Laurie Nelson at the 2019 event Credit: Laurie Nelson
Laurie Nelson They’re fully robed, and they sit on the floor instead of standing or sitting on chairs, so it’s nice, flowing lines. So when I draw, I’m listening to the music and absorbing the music, and it comes out through my pencil when I draw it. It’s a nice combination.
Roopa Mahadevan It’s kind of a round audience; people are sitting on the left, right, and the center, as opposed to just straight ahead, so even spatially it’s a unique setup. So all these things contribute to you kind of just taking more stock of how you perform and what you perform.
Wayne Montana I did learn quite a bit from the musicians. Tabla players often are very particular with mike placement; I learned to just let them place the mikes on their drums. Some of them are very attuned to frequency numbers. Being a live sound person and a studio guy who mixes and a bass player and guitar player, I know frequencies. I was kind of freaked out when I was bringing them up in the monitors, and they’d be, like, “Bump 2 dB of 2k in the monitor.” And then, “Cut 500 3 dB.” I’d walk up before the show and I’d hear them playing, and it sounded wicked in the monitor. They knew what they wanted—they got exactly what they wanted.
Ganesh Rajagopalan South Indian instruments like the veena, the mridangam, even the tanpura—when you hear it from the aspect of sound, you can see that our instruments are deeper but have lesser reverb than the North Indian counterpart. When you see the sarod, or the sitar, or the tabla, the resonance of each instrument is long—you can see the resonance going out for a long time. The sarod is a deep sound, but when you hit one note, it stays on for a long time. But when you take the veena, it is short; so the gamakas [ornaments applied to or between notes] are different, because of how we do that in South Indian instruments. So the aspect of raga and everything changes because of that—or the traditional understanding of it.
Wayne Montana With Ragamala, it’s always great—world-class musicians in the same room, playing all different types of instruments. Hearing them in that room that has this beautiful, long, like, three-second reverb in it, and hearing how certain musicians play against the natural reverb—they hear how long the delay is, and they’re playing with that, and that’s just a cool thing to see, people who play really well and are sensitive to the room, and they’re interacting with the room.
Saraswathi Ranganathan Every time, I present Carnatic [music] in a way that people can understand, even if it is complicated. I try to pick ragas and ensure that I have a conversation with the crowd so that they can absorb all the more.
Debashish Bhattacharya You can see the changes of the time, and the mood, the feeling, the energy, and also the environment is changing. Because at the very beginning, people were naive about Indian classical music. But now, in the United States, whenever we play, I have so many students—I have so many people who already studied music, either from me or some of my colleague musicians or their children. So the culture is going in waves.
The abbreviated online-only Ragamala that streamed in 2020
Brian Keigher In 2020 we did an online version of Ragamala, so it was four programs that were streamed online. Then in 2021, the city was still not programming events. That was the only year that the Department of Cultural Affairs was not involved. We took the initiative and staged Ragamala at the Second Presbyterian Church.
Saraswathi Ranganathan That was the only time the venue changed.
Brian Keigher I figured we had to revive it and do something to keep the name alive, so we staged it at the church and did an abbreviated Ragamala, which was packed and pretty well received.
Saraswathi Ranganathan We were able to get the city to back Ragamala again, and it resumed in 2022—I was part of that also. I have been a fixture of Ragamala for most of the years, except for maybe two or three.
Unfretted at last year’s Ragamala, from left: mridangam player Akshay Anantapadmanabhan, violinist Sruti Sarathy, and chitravina player Vishaal Sapuram Credit: Walter S. Mitchell, City of Chicago
Sruti Sarathy Last year with Unfretted was really special because it was our first tour as a new trio in the United States. And to have this packed audience that was so enthusiastic and cheering at various points—if you’re in a typical Carnatic space, people are certainly expressive, but not in those ways necessarily. So to hear how that resonated with this Chicago audience, how much people were enjoying it, and how much they were willing to share that with us was really special for our first tour as a band.
Ashwin Rode I’ve performed a few times for South Asian Classical Music Society and one of the events of Mandala Arts—and Brian was overseeing that event, so that’s how I got in contact with him. [Last] year, he [asked] if I were to participate in Ragamala. I don’t know what the time slot is going to be, but it’s a challenge of my musical career to be able to pull this off at 3 AM or whenever it is. [Editor’s note: Rode performs at 6:30 AM in a trio with Praneet Marathe on harmonium and Dhananjay Kunte on tabla.]
Ganesh Rajagopalan After the Grammy win, it’ll be [my] first time in Chicago, so it’ll be wonderful to meet the people there, to greet them and say, “Ah, yes!” [Laughs.]
Carlos Cuauhtémoc Tortolero Personally speaking, Ragamala’s the highlight of my year.
Debashish Bhattacharya When [I’m] brought to play in Chicago festival, I [feel] that I’m playing in India, not in America. That kind of warmth and that kind of excitement, I still have.
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Publish date : 2024-09-12 05:07:00
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