Counting in Five
How Indian music changed the lives of five Americans.
by Sandy Gordon
Loren Oppenheimer and Michael Lukshis Tabla Concert
RUTHERFORD, NJ – The song was familiar to suburban ears: planes droned down through the dusk, and in the silence between, the autumn wind rustled still-green leaves and skipped children’s shouts across lawns.
A familiar song- save for the sound escaping through the screen door of 12 William Street. The unassuming white house reverberated with the beat of foreign drums. Inside, five players sat in a circle on a red rug. Their hands slapped against goatskin pulled taut over metal and wooden bowls as they pounded rhythms on traditional tabla drums. The pulse was carried from India, from centuries ago.
A gold-framed painting of four Indian men leaned against the wall. Sejal Kukadia introduced them as the maestros. She pointed to one: Divyang Vakilji, his eyes soft and dark, playing a pair of tabla. “Guruji is our teacher, that’s what we call him,” she explained, translating guru as teacher, and ji as a sign of respect. “He showed me what tabla was all about- how it’s a life-long process of learning.”
The house where Vakilji’s students practice is 7500 miles from his birthplace in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. Vakilji’s students here look nothing like the Indian men in the painting. Here, tradition spills from the frame and melds into 21st century America.
Christopher Barnes sat between a sitar and a Samsung flatscreen TV. With his left hand, he pumped air into a harmonium while his right hand repeated a melody on the keys. Until he moved from South Carolina to New Jersey for college, the 25-year-old jazz saxophonist said he had never seen a tabla.
Kukadia was the only Indian in the room. Her long fingers trilled over the drums, a feeling familiar since childhood. At family gatherings in Kukadia’s native Latham, NY, relatives would sing and play Indian instruments. She always gravitated toward the tabla. “At that time I just thought it was an instrument that you could play cool rhythms on,” she said.
Kukadia met her guru Vakil on a trip to India during college. Several years later, in 2002, she brought him to the U.S., and they started the Taalim School of Indian Music at the house in Rutherford (taalim means training).
“The music is really intense and it involves much more than technical practice,” Kukadia said. “When you have a guru, you join a family, and you experience a whole new way of life. You tend to develop a whole different mindset. Especially for us; we’re all Americans.”
Loren Oppenheimer launched into a chant, reciting bol- the spoken syllables that correspond to each rhythmic pattern. Then he played what he had said. The floor shook with the lowest notes. “I think that the American culture has more interest in diversity and multiplicity because we’re just a bunch of immigrants,” he said. “We have all these different options.” Oppenheimer, 29, moved to Rutherford from Charlottesville, VA, to help establish the Taalim school. He said that while Americans are often encouraged to explore many activities, studying tabla required him to narrow his focus. “That was a big change. It was like, okay. Everything channels into this one thing: tabla.”
Mike Lukshis, 26, had been playing guitar since his childhood in East Brunswick, NJ, when college friends introduced him tabla, which then became his key instrument. “There’s a tendency in Indian culture… of having a very specific focus in life,” he said. “You can see it in yogis or in different people of Hindu religion who just meditate all the time- they just do nothing but one thing for their entire life. And so this is extended into music- the idea that you go in one direction and you walk as far as you can down that one road as possible.”
During a riala, a fast, flowing composition, Lukshis improvised busy patterns. His hands blurred and his lips tensed. “In Indian classical music, and especially tabla, there’s this pervasive, absolute obsession with the tone of the instrument,” he said.
“One night- it was probably one o’ clock in the morning- Guruji gave us a whole lesson on Na and how it has to be perfect, and how it has to be the same every time,” said Brian Krutzel, 27, a drummer from central New Jersey.
“We played Na for an hour,” Barnes said. Kukadia tapped her finger on the edge of a drum to
demonstrate. A high, focused note rang out: Na.
Lukshis said he began to notice a gulf between the Western and Indian interpretations of classical music as his tabla playing progressed. “That was the biggest thing that drew me in,” he said, “how interesting it was that these two different cultures spent all this time and found completely different answers to the question of music.”
There are some similarities. Kukadia explained that the tabla is a folk instrument found in many Indian households. Yet, she said, Indian classical music is separated from mainstream culture. Like the training of classical musicians at American conservatories, becoming a classical tabla player requires sadhana, or devout practice. Kukadia said when she immersed herself in the instrument, “the concept of what I was doing was completely foreign to all of my Indian relatives- they just did not understand why I was doing it.” Furthermore, Kukadia stands out in a tradition of male tabla virtuosos. “Traditionally, women tended to learn vocal or sitar,” she said. She said she is one of the only female classical tabla professionals in the U.S.
The five musicians agreed that Indians in both the States and in India generally encouraged their playing. “I find musicians tend to be very cold and competitive,” said Krutzel, but his apprehension softened when the group visited India this summer. There, a “very nervous” Krutzel performed his first solo in front of an entirely Indian audience of tabla players. He was encouraged with applause and handshakes. “I’ve never experienced such a warm crowd of musicians,” he said.
“When I’m playing tabla for Indian people, they’re always very impressed that someone has taken this interest in their culture,” Lukshis said.
For Lukshis, learning to think in Indian rhythms changed more than simply his notion of music. Most Western music requires musicians to subdivide a steady pulse into groups of two, three, or four beats; to play tabla, one learns to count in groups of five and seven. “It’s had this really interesting physical world effect,” he said. He began recognizing emerging patterns in physical objects and emotional relationships. “I think it has a lot to do with tabla,” he said. “Understanding these basic rhythms. It’s music, but they’re also rhythms of life.”
Brian playing tabla
Rhythm Riders Music - India 