[jariel]

Right now: Vijay Kaporkar, Raga Bhairavi.

It's 10 minutes long. One chord. One tempo.

There's the accordion style instrument playing 3 note drone (reminiscent of pipes), minor chord.

There's some keys and vocals moving up and down the minor scale, somewhat randomly.

That's it, for 10 minutes.

This is pretty exemplary of this kind of music, and it's obviously limiting.

By every musical measure, there's not much going on.

I don't doubt it's authenticity, or that it has influenced other forms of music - but it's nothing remotely comparable to Jazz for example.

It's a hyper specific genre.

Edit: the link from the above comment (Ramakrishnan Murthy) ... is quite good actually, the creative quality is much higher than the music the article link, but the conclusions are mostly the same. It reminds me quite a lot of 'Pipes and Drums' where you have hyper specific and constrained instrumental qualities of a couple flavours (pipes are in one key, snare drum is ostensibly a very basic instrument) but they take it to to limit within those constraints.

[abishekk92]

Can you elaborate how exactly you find it limiting? Granted most Indian classical music historically has been monophonic and the compositions focussed on the melody. Even though it is primarily melodic and lyrical, the microtonal nature of the ragas provides the musician with a tremendous amount of room for improvisation. We've barely scratched surface of what is possible with microtonal harmony.

There are so many musicians, though rooted in tradition have pushed the definition of Indian classical music, like John McLauglin and his band shakti for example [0] or anything Berklee Indian Ensemble does. [1] or the carnatic take five [2]

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzmaT9T2teU

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dn_1O3J56E8

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipCqEcEVFxU