“It must be perfect,” my voice teacher Mysore V. Amba Prasad tells me after I’ve botched the pitch of a mid-tempo Janti Varasa. Janti Varasas are specific sets of swaras, or notes, of the 7-note Indian scale. Prasad comes over to my house in Mysore almost daily to run me through increasingly more complicated arrangements of the swaras. The exercises are designed to instill the swaras (and the talas, or clapped beats) into the students head and body so they can what they are intended to do: ‘impart joy to the listener.”
And so I repeat the phrase of this particular Janti Varasa…with and without the tala, and once again with Prasad.
At this point, I am far from perfect, and my progress is marked by how I can tell when I’m off as much as by when I can keep up with Prasad’s lessons. But I’m game, some primal part of my extremely California, straight-ahead Western-music playing self having a unlikely but happy affinity for the sacred sounds of Classical music’s foundation.
I first took classes with Prasad — a violin virtuoso who teaches mandolin, guitar and voice as well as his primary instrument — in 2008 as a way to keep my voice in moderate singing shape while I studied yoga at Mysore’s Ashtanga Institute. It wasn’t my first introduction to the 7-note Indian scale; when I first returned to California at the end of the 1990s I happened upon Chloe Goodchild’s Naked Voice Singing workshops and had enjoyed both singing the basic scale and the fact that each note was associated with the chakras.
This trip, the voice lessons are running about equal to my yoga studies in terms of both time, attention and challenge, although I’m still very much a baby bird at it. I have no pretense of becoming a Carnatic singer, but the emotionalism of the sound, Indian Classical Music’s strong link to scriptures and how each basic note is associated with a chakra and animal, compels me to keep wading into its very deep waters. As I both practice and learn more about the Carnatic system, it’s that much more apparent how such music that addresses spirit, lineage and body so holistically, is at once elegant and healing.
Deborah Crooks (www.DeborahCrooks.com) is a writer, performing songwriter and recording artist based in San Francisco whose lyric driven and soul-wise music has drawn comparison to Lucinda Williams, Chrissie Hynde and Natalie Merchant.
Singing about faith, love and loss, her lyrics are honed by a lifetime of writing and world travel while her music draws on folk, rock, Americana and the blues. She released her first EP “5 Acres” in 2003 produced by Roberta Donnay, which caught the attention of Rocker Girl Magazine, selecting it for the RockerGirl Discoveries Cd. In 2007, she teamed up with local producer Ben Bernstein to complete “Turn It All Red” Ep, followed by 2008’s “Adding Water to the Ashes” CD, and a second full-length CD “2010. She’s currently working on a third CD to be released in 2013.
Deborah’s many performance credits include an appearance at the 2006 Millennium Music Conference, the RockerGirl Magazine Music Convention, IndieGrrl, at several of the Annual Invasion of the GoGirls at SXSW in Austin, TX, the Harmony Festival and 2009’s California Music Fest, MacWorld 2010, Far West Fest and many other venues and events. She toured the Northwest as part “Indie Abundance Music, Money & Mindfulness” (2009) with two other Bay Area artists, and followed up with “The Great Idea Tour of the Southwest in March 2010 with Jean Mazzei.
