I went to the listening session on the 78 rpm records of gauhar jan conducted by aneesh and shubha on thursday and it was very interesting. i had never listened much to gauhar jan partly because the recordings i have are of very poor audio quality and also as jon barlow had reminded me gauhar jan somehow in the music world of affecionados of old recordings did not have the great reputation as say did zohra bai agrawali. maybe that is because she was from the earliest era of recording and further from collective memory. the recently released biography of gauhar jan written by vikram sampath has been the talk of the town and has certainly revived interest in her. i have just started reading it and it seems very well researched and interesting. aneesh and shubha did a very nice job of analyzing the music. they had taken only 40 recordings out of an astonishing output of over 600 that were recorded of her. i think these really are remarkable documents of a direction this new technology was forming at the very inception of recordings by this singer. how interesting that she wasnt so concerned about singing the full sthaye of the composition, much less the antara. that she recorded so many kinds of songs- khayals, garbas, kajris, songs in persian and arabic. sometimes the taal was messed up in the beginning of the recording (as pointed out by aneesh) or the recording had a false start. Some people in the audience were surprised by the very poor audio quality of the recordings used and I too wonder if better cleaned-up versions couldnt have been used. One recording, supposedly surmalhar was really impossible to hear. aneeshs comments on the taal were very interesting because that too is difficult for a layman to hear- the tabla being recorded more in the background and the thekas being sometimes very different from what they are now. One recording had a remarkable tabla accompaniment- not a theka really- the tabla player followed the words of the song almost exactly. it was interesting too how on a recording the harmonium played a taan before she sang it, almost as a cue. i have never heard anything like that before. i was also impressed by the vibrancy of the tabla accompanment. shubha pointed out a feature of all the recordings of gauhar jan that she had heard- very crisp sapaat taans. That she sang these on every recording even when perhaps not usually appropriate like with ghazals and thumris leaves almost a signature on the tunes.
