Raag Mishra Shivaranjani (Short Alap, Gat)

(for short version)    • Raag Mishra Shivaranjani (Sitar) by ...  

Sitarist : Pandit Nikhil Banerjee

Tabla Player : Anindo Chatterjee

A Syed Wajid's Presentation

*Pandit Nikhil Banerjee (19311986) was one of India's most prominent sitar players of the second half of the 20th Century. He never achieved the glamour of Vilayat Khan or his gurubhai Ravi Shankar, but Nikhil Banerjee did win great critical acclaim and the hearts of many music lovers. He is remembered as a musician's musician.

Nikhil Banerjee was born in Calcutta, his father Jitendranath Banerjee, an amateur sitariya, taught him to play the instrument. Young Nikhil grew into a child prodigy, won an AllBengal Sitar Competition at the age of 9 and soon was playing for All India Radio. At the time, his sister was a student of khyal great Amir Khan, who became a lifelong influence.

In 1947 Banerjee met Allauddin Khan of Maihar Gharana, who was to become his main guru. Allauddin did not want to take on more students, but changed his mind after listening to one of Banerjee's radio broadcasts.

Obviously, what Allauddin was passing on to most of his students was not playing technique but the musical knowledge and approach of the Maihar gharana (school); yet there was a definite trend and discipline in his teaching to infuse the sitar and sarod with the beenbaj aesthetic of the Rudra veena, surbahar and sursringar long, elaborate alap (unaccompanied improvisation) built on intricate meend work (bending of the note).

After some five years in Maihar, Banerjee embarked on a concert career that was to take him to all corners of the world and last right up to his death. All through his life he kept taking lessons from Baba Allauddin and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and Annapurna Devi. Perhaps reflecting his early upbringing, he always remained a humble musician, and was content with much less limelight than a player of his stature could have vied for. For him, musicmaking was a spiritual rather than a worldly path. Even so, in 1968, he was decorated with the Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan.

Although he recorded extensively, the studio environment made Banerjee nervous. Not so the concert hall; his live albums, many of which were brought out around the turn of the 21st Century by Raga Records in New York, are widely considered to be the finest documents of his playing. Today, he is regarded as one of the greatest traditional sitarists of the 20th century.

His interpretation of ragas was always highly traditional; at his very best, it was of the kind that would bring out wholly new ideas from a raga, ideas packing enormous surprise in that they were so clearly linked to tradition, yet so previously unthought of. He created a raga Manomanjari of his own, mixing ideas from Kalavati and Marwa.

Throughout his career, Nikhil Banerjee played a Hiren Roy sitar.