It's a pleasant morning, cool and a little damp after late-night rain, and we get lots of friendly responses from the morning commute. Only one person seems driven to comment that my sign has nothing on it. "Dude, your sign's black!" I smile and tell him, "Yep." The exigencies of roadside communication preclude further elaboration; he moves on, no doubt scratching his head.

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This week is a continuation of work on "badarwa barasan laagi" in Sur Malhar, and after a short warmup in the lower register I take about twenty minutes to sing free bol-alap before starting the tabla. This work has to do with shaping coherent musical gestures around the song's textual content without metric regulation: pure shape and sound. Any of these lines will be effective and resolve correctly...

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...depending on where they're started and how they're sustained. Long vowels and diphthongs do a lot of work here, shaping the sonic contours of the line (as well as the duration of pauses and the location of breath points). A few minutes before 8 I switch on the tabla at a relaxed 160 bpm and begin using these variations inside the rendition of the song itself.

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The key (as I learn every day) is to not be in a hurry, to allow the song to unfold at its own pace and gradually reveal its content. I remind myself to leave space, to think things over, to breathe and pause and look around, to pull back from Hindustani music's maximalist tendencies. I restore the antara to memory, glitching a few times on the second line, which has a tricky phrase.

5/

The song is already jam-packed with syllables, which suggests bol-bant strategies I'm only beginning to study. I do some quick counting and formulate a little tihai in syllabified eighth notes, using the text of the first line, then practice entering and resolving it in different ways and with different melodies. Fun. I push the tempo up a bit to 165 bpm — still comfortable.

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