Ragas in the round

>> Sitarissimo's Uwe Neumann takes liberties with the script

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Coming across the name Sitarissimo among my press releases, I immediately envisioned droning sitar accompanied by a foppish dandy in a powdered wig and ruffle-cuffs, tooting on a piccolo.

Here's the real deal. First, although musicians named Shankar generally seem to gravitate to stringed instruments, the Shankar here taps the tablas (E. Shankar, a one-time student of the great Zakir Hussain, is an established figure here in Montreal).

The sitar itself, meanwhile, is wielded by a German guy, Uwe Neumann. A former jazz-rocker who studied Indian classical music for 10 years in the Bengal region, he's comfortable enough with the lore and theory to shape it in a personal fashion.

"We do quite traditional music," says Neumann of Sitarissimo. "A bit more dynamic, maybe, but still traditional ragas. The compositions are partly my own."

More than partly, in the end, due to the inherently improvisational nature of ragas, the foundation of Indian classical. "It's always improvisations on a theme," he explains. "To define raga is quite difficult in short, but one has a scale, and each note of that scale has its particular character. The relationship between the notes is defined by how you move from one to the other.

"It's a bit like these seven or eight notes are characters in a play. One expresses a particular mood through the relation of these notes--like, one is the boss and one is the helper. So one is the most dominant, one is the secondary dominant, and then other people appear and have their relations, too, to the boss and helper and among themselves."

Something unusual Neumann brings to the table is a sansa. "It's an African stringed instrument, made from a coconut, with different names in different African states--kalimba, marimba, jubo."

"It's a bit santoor-ish, the sound of it," he says, finding an Indian equivalent. "I play it not in an African style but more in an Indian style. When I played it for my teachers in India, when I prepared it as such, they recognized this as a raga also. They hear the raga inside--it's the same kind of mode."

With DJ Gordon Field of Interchill and host Neerav at the Yantra trance night, Petit Café Campus, Friday, Nov. 10, 10:30pm, $7