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VidyA concerts Fri 9/19 and Fri 9/26

Just a quick reminder — a couple great VidyA concerts coming up.

Friday, September 19, 2008. 8pm.

VidyA at Yerba Buena Bay Area Now series. San Francisco, CA.
Located at 2698 Folsom St at the Red Poppy Art House (23rd and Folsom).
More info here.

Friday, September 26, 08 – VidyA at Hillside Club. Berkeley, CA. This is a beautiful venue in the East Bay. If you haven’t been, make sure to come! This will feature Eric Vogler as a guest on bass.

2286 Cedar Street
Berkeley 94709
Info: (510) 845-1350
More Info here.

Here are some pictures to leave you with.

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Take care,

Prasant

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Interview in “The Score” Magazine

Remember the other interview I hadn’t seen yet? Well, the person who interviewed me, Vanipriya, just sent me a copy of the interview.

Interview with “The Score” music magazine August 08: Online | PDF | Photo (jpg)

Vanipriya, as it turns out, studies Carnatic music with violinist Delhi P. Sunderrajan, a great violinist who played with me on my Duality album.

The interview was for a new magazine in India called “The Score.” When I saw the magazine, I was pretty amazed because I had never seen a magazine cover such a wide range of genres. It had everything from Alicia Keys, to Chennai indie rock bands, to Carnatic music and everything in between.

 Picture L-R: Trichur Narendran, V. Suresh, Prasant, B.U. Ganeshprasad

The article briefly covers the concert I did in Chennai at Sri Muthu Venkata Subba Rao Hall and then
 has some quick Q & A. If you didn’t catch reviews and other stuff on that concert, see this post.

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New VidyA Photos

To coincide with our new VidyA CD release, we finally got some photos taken by a great Bay Area photographer, Nate Keck (who also happens to be a friend of the Red Poppy).

I think we were able to get a few nice shots — the whole thing was natural with very limited actual posing for the pictures. That was great for me, because posing is not my forte. I think David has it down though.

Anyways, I uploaded all the color pictures to flickr, so please check them out and tell us your favorites in the comments or via e-mail. It hard to decide looking at so many pictures of ourselves. We eventually have to choose two or three that would be used for most purposes.

View the pictures here.

Here is my favorite: L-R: Sameer Gupta, David Ewell, Prasant Radhakrishnan.

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Thoughts?

If you are in the Bay Area, make to sure to check out two exciting concerts we have this month! Info here.

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Blog finally unites with the website

I usually wouldn’t want to post about anything too technical when it comes to the website, but I thought I will mention this, in case someone out there is interested. If not, just skip over this post to get to the next musically-related or otherwise more interesting post.

If you have visited this blog recently, you might have noticed that it went from a somewhat generic theme to complete integration with my prasantmusic.com website.

I actually happened upon this while contemplating a switch over to a self-hosted blog using WordPress. I had already installed WordPress on my server, imported my old blogger posts and was playing around with it when I realized that it would take me way too long to figure things out and and potentially make it work with my site. It definitely has much better features as everyone else says on the web, but I’m a musician, not a techie (even though I have often stay up late staring bleary-eyed at the computer, testing little changes in coding), and I just don’t want to spend too much time/effort starting out from scratch.

I am a ravenous Googler, like I think everyone has now become, and I found a nifty tutorial on how to integrate an existing hosted Blogger into a normal website. Since I’m familiar with the guts of Blogger template code, I was able to do the integration in a very short time.

Anyways, there are a few shortcomings to keeping my old ftp Blogger setup.

1. Archive features are bad. It is very cumbersome to navigate posts through the archives and there is no “older posts” link at the bottom of each page, so navigating the archives is inevitable.
2. No integrated search. ** Well a little bit of tweaking and I got a nifty search box for the blog using Google Custom Domain Search, so that is fixed and appears to work well, I might add.
3. No tags, categories etc. There are labels, but no dynamic way to display them.
4. No dynamic “related posts” or “recent posts” features.

Of course I could switch over the Google hosted blogspot and get some of these features, but I would really rather host it myself to protect my data, and I would have to use one of the generic themes again.

I guess the main thing is that I don’t think too many of you would miss these features too much — would you? Check out the new setup, and let me know if there is anything you find to be too much of a pain or difficult to use. Or perhaps, you have an idea or a feature you would like to see. Let me know!

Now, back to listening to Madurai Somu…oh, it just changed to Rage Against the Machine.

These shuffle playlists are crazy!

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VidyA CD available all over the web

I mentioned in an earlier post that I would let you know when the new VidyA CD would be available at major retailers online.

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Well, its a bit delayed, but here are the links you might have been waiting for.

Some independent music stores like Amoeba, Rasputin, Aquariu etc., will also carry it. If you don’t see it, ask for it! There are also other online services that have it as well.

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India Trip Round Up

Well, after over a month’s absence posting here, I finally decided to put together a brief round up of my trip to India. The trip went very well. I had a good mix of personal practice time and concerts among other things. I even got to catch the latest Batman film, “Dark Knight” a couple days before I left. Definitely a dark and chilling film.

I was very happy to spend some quality time with my guru, Dr. Kadri Gopalnath. I was also able to catch up with some friends, mentors and other musicians who I usually spend time with, such as T.R. Subramaniam, A. Kanyakumari, Guruvayur Dorai, V. Suresh, Ganeshprasad among others. This time, it was a treat to perform with B.U. Ganeshprasad (violin), Trichur Narendran (mridangam), Phalgun (mridangam), and V. Suresh during my concerts among others.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, my first concert of the trip was at Rameswaram. Rameswaram has an interesting history, mainly because of the religious background. Myself, Ganeshprasad and Phalgun did a morning concert there after a long a night train. It was a part of a three day Gurupurnima event. A video was taken, but as usual, I never find time to upload. I will do it soon enough. Here is a screen grab from the video I have…

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After Rameswaram and Thiruvunamalai, I had a concert at a new hall in Chennai called Sri Muthu Venkata Subba Rao Memorial Hall. Quite a long name. I can say that I was extremely impressed with the hall. I think it is the best hall in Chennai. The concert was curated by the hall’s programming director and sponsored by a company there called Gatsby. It was definitely a crowd different from the usual Carnatic listeners, but the response was very good and it was a pleasure to play in a quality environment and ambience focused purely on the music. The whole thing was recorded, both audio and video, so hopefully I will share some of that with you soon. That concert had myself on saxophone, B.U. Ganeshprasad, Trichur Narendran on mridangam and V. Suresh on ghatam.

The concert brought with it a number of press articles of all types. I haven’t received a copy of them all, but here are some links to the ones I heard about so far. If you want to get the latest, probably check back on my press page. If you find anything that is not there yet, let me know.

There was also a TV interview, but I lost track of that one. Some of these articles have a slightly odd interpretation of what I had said during interviews, but I have learned that it is unavoidable.

Anyways, that is about all I can cover right now. The other concerts were memorable as well, but I don’t think I will go over everything here. I will try my best to post some videos or other media soon.

By the way, I just added a little feed of my latest photos from flickr to the left of the blog. Hope you like it. Between that and my Twitter updates (feel free to “follow” me), you can easily see what I’m up to just by looking at the sidebar, even if I don’t have a chance to update the blog.

Just finished listening to the 1967 Lalgudi Jayaraman concert at Krishna Ghana Sabha…again. Never gets old!

Take care, and keep listening!

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Concert at Sir Mutha Hall, Chennai, India. July 27, 2008

As you probably already know, I am writing to you from India. So far the trip has been great. I just got back from a trip to Rameswaram, where I did a concert and then Thiruvunamalai. The concert was with B.U. Ganeshprasad on Violin and P. Phalgun on Mridangam. Here is a picture from the Rameswaram Temple.

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This Sunday, I am performing a Carnatic concert at a newly opened hall in Chennai called Sir Mutha Venkatasubba Rao Memorial Hall. The concert starts at 7pm sharp and is open to the public.

The lineup will include:

Prasant Radhakrishnan: Saxophone
B.U. Ganeshprasad: Violin
Trichur Narendran: Mridangam
V. Suresh: Ghatam


You can get complimentary passes:

  • Contact the sponsor of the event: info@gatsby.in with number of tickets required. Or call (044) 28331677. You can also get passes at the Raymonds outlet in Nungambakkam.
  • Contact the hall at info@sirmuthamemorial.com

The hall is located at:  

Shenston Park, 13/1 Harrington Road
Chetput, Chennai 600031 Tamil Nadu 

It is on the Lady Andal School premises. If you know anyone in Chennai, tell them to come!

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Fun with Air Travel (not a music post)

Please note: This post has nothing to do with music. With that out of the way…

I am writing from Changi Airport in Singapore. I am on my way to India for a five week trip for some intensive practice/study and also some concerts around South India. I think I’ve been to this airport countless times now. I am in the unfortunate position of having over an eight hour layover in the middle of the night Singapore time. With the transit hotels overbooked, there really was nothing to do here except wait and endure the 40 minutes bad music that loops over the airport speakers.

Anyways, this flight was especially long. Over 11 hours to stop in Seoul, Korea. The usual antics ensued, beginning with some Berkeley students wanting me to switch seats so they could be together. I soon found myself in the middle seat of the middle section, you know, the worst seat on the entire plane, next to some kids gyrating nonstop and calling for their mommy in an extremely high decibel level.

Due to lack of sleep I watched more movies than I ever have in a given period…such as Warlords, Juno, Horton Hears A Who and even Japanese film “Smilers,” a heartwarming tale about an over enthusiastic tap dancer with a degree in child psychology who must lead a junior league hockey team in Hokkaido to the championships in order the win his girflfriend’s hand in marriage (with a good dose of McDonald’s product placement). There were other movies too, but I wont get into it.

There was a 90 minute layover in Seoul. In the airport I noticed a funny trend. Nearly all of the younger Korean couples had coordinated or sometimes exactly matching outfits. I spotted at least five such couples at the same gate. I am not one to notice clothing, but it was so glaringly obvious, and actually a bit hilarious. I wonder if that trend will ever make it the U.S.? Matching couples clothes! Anyways, I’m probably the last person to notice this…

I spent some time in a small Korea Culture Museum they had there. Not bad.

I’ll leave you with two thoughts:

1. Why is it that the majority of passengers jump up and stand in a line before boarding even when its not  yet time to board and it wont help them get on the plane faster anyway?

2. Singapore “Changi” airport advertises all over that they have FREE wireless surfing. Well, from what I could see its not free — you need to have one of those airport wireless providers to login. I might be wrong, but you will need to use the ethernet stations located around the airport.

Have a great holiday weekend!

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Recap of May 3rd concert at Sangati Center

This almost two months overdue, but I thought I would give you a quick post about a concert at Sangati Center on May 3rd, 2008.

The concert featured myself on saxophone, Ajay Narasimha on Violin and Anantha R. Krishnan on Mridungam. It was great to play with both of these artists. I had played with Ajay before and it was the first time playing with Anantha, who in case you did not know, is the grandson of the legendary mridangam vidwan Palghat Raghu. As he jokingly said before the concert, “that doesn’t mean I play well.” But of course, he played wonderfully, and we all had a good time.

I am looking forward to performing together again.

  Here are a couple photos and excerpt videos from the concert, with more to come. Full photoset on flickr here.

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I still have news to tell you about VidyA. I am off to India for some personal practice time and a few concerts. I will try to get in a few posts while I am there.

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VidyA CD Release Concert Tonight!/ Radio Play / Record Stores

Hi!

That is me right this moment…not sure why I decided to include this picture.

Today we will be performing at the Red Poppy Art House to celebrate the release of the new CD!

It is extra special, because today is my dad’s birthday (mom, myself, dad below).
Happy Birthday!

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We will also be doing a photo shoot with Bay Area photographer Nate Keck, so you can finally expect to see some updated photos of the group for press purposes and otherwise. Here is a random (and blurry) shot of us playing, just for kicks.

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Today the new album was played on KPFA’s Music of the World show with David McBurnie. I believe they played “Lost Tales,” the track based on Bhairavi ragam. They also gave away a couple sets of tickets for the concert.

The latest development is that the new album is now available at Ameoba Music in Berkeley and Rasputin in Berkeley, with other locations following soon, like Aquarius in SF (they have East Facing right now). Some of my Indian Classical albums are there also. If you can’t find it there, ask for it and be persistent!

I will post more info as I find out.

Thanks to everyone for your support. There has been so much activity leading up to this album, but I wouldn’t even call it “work” because I have been so lucky to have many great people to work with and great listeners.

Have a great long weekend.

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