Thursday, August 05, 2010

Vinod Prasanna tour (part 1)

Vinod Prasanna is an old friend of mine from Varanasi, where we both lived in Munna House at the same time. He comes from the famous bansuri Prasanna family, and now lives in Melbourne with his wife Lisa. He had a little tour of Brisbane and NNSW last month and it was a pleasure and blessing for me to accompany him. We played concerts in Gold Coast, Byron Shire and Brisbane - I'm waiting on photos and video from the Brisbane concert so I'll put that in a later post. In the meantime here are some snaps from the first part of the tour.

First up we had an accompaniment workshop for my two top students, Sanjey (pictured here) and Arka. It was a great experience for them to have to remember all their kaidas and tihais in a snap, and to see how fast they should be playing nadhindhinna.

As usual Yuki opened all our concerts with her beautiful Sanskrit mantras. This is from our Gold Coast concert.

On Gold Coast we played in Gecko House, Currumbin, thanks to organiser Sara Shakti who was about 8 and a half months pregnant!

Back to the Temple of Melodious Sound in Ocean Shores for my third concert there this year. Many thanks as always to Paul Kimmel for providing such a great space for Indian classical music.

Our friends Tahir Qawwal and Barbi came for a beautiful jam...

...which grew to include Tarshito and Paul as well. A beautiful concert.