Tabla Tarrango @ Krishna Fest

On Sun August 23 my top students and I gave our first public performance, at Krishna Fest, ISKCON's celebrations of Janmastami (Krishna's birthday) at Roma St Parklands. In the tradition of my first guru Debu Bhattacharya, I'm thinking of calling our tabla group Tabla Tarrango. The weather was absolutely beautiful (a slight cooling off from the freakish week of 30+ degrees August winter days) and thousands of festival goers enjoyed a range of entertainment and devotional music, heavy on the kirtans.

I was honoured to have my students invited to play, and so proud of them. We played for about 20 minutes, opening with uthaan, then Arka and I played a kaida, Sam, Sanjay and Jesinthan played a rela, peshkar all together, then some gat kaidas and tukaras one by one, culminating in a powerful tukara all together.

My old friend Soolaba on sitar

Carmela singing kirtan

Diwarkar Mothay and his young singing students

A bit more kirtan

Tabla Tarrango
- Sam Mead, Arka Basu, Shen Flindell, Sanjeyan Sivaananthan, Jesinthan Ketheeswaran

Very proud of my boys