A show replete with odes to love, ghazals and pastoral melody

Namit Das presents a soulful evening of love, ghazals, and melody at the 'Remembering Veenapani Festival'.

Odes to love, ghazals and pastoral melody saturated the evening of music presented by actor-turned-singer Namit Das at Adishakti during the recently-concluded 10the edition of the ‘Remembering Veenapani Festival’.

The show ‘Namit and Khwaab’, which had Nishant Nagar in accompaniment, carried the free spirited vibe of a mehfil, with the artist jokingly referring to some of the material as “rejected compositions”, which for one reason or the other failed to see the light of day. Some of the songs had never progressed beyond the entertainment fare at random family gatherings, but remain a non-monetised anthology, a language of kinship.

The lightness of touch with which he reworked most of the material, especially ghazals, exuded a free-spirited side to the stage and screen artiste, known for films such as Wake Up Sid and Ankhon Dekhi.

There was no hint of being burdened by the family legacy—his father Chandan Dass, an illustrious ghazal exponent; his maternal grandfather K. Pannalal, a musician par excellence, and uncle Jaidev Kumar, a reputed Punjabi music director.

It was a tightrope act between keeping the essence intact but shifting the melodic approach, that not only risked outraging the purist, or also off-putting the casual music lover if the experiment goes awry. The duo was translocating the ghazal instrumentation to an altogether alien soundscape, where guitar, electronic synth sounds and pre-set percussion rhythms substituted the tabla-harmonium sonic habitat. At one point, Mr. Das wondered how a ghazal singer in the traditionalist mould like his father, who was not yet privy to the set, would react!

At the same time, the pay-off is high when everything falls in place; a breakthrough best exemplified by a tango-style reformatting of a ghazal about fragrance by the precocious Pakistani poet Parveen Shakir. In this case, the poetic vision of the original verse were infused a new musical aesthetic in the rendition of Ak-se khushbu bikharne.., and turned out to one of the standout pieces of the evening.

After the immortal Mirza Ghalib, Na tha kuch tho that is replete with metaphysical querying was featured, the Faiz Ahmed Faiz fans made their presence felt in the hall, when Mr. Das introduced the rubaiyat (four-line stanzas) “Raat yun dil mein teri khoyi hui yaad aayi...” (Vikram Seth adding to the body of translations of the famous lines).