Hasu Patel

HASU PATEL, a disciple of Sitar legend Ustad Vilayat Khan Saheb is one of the few distinguished female artists performing today classical music on Sitar, the most popular string instrument of India. As a performer, composer, and educator, she has dedicated her life to preserving and propagating in its pristine purity the fascinating, highly evolved classical music of Ancient India.
Born in the culturally rich city of Baroda, India, Hasu began her musical studies in early childhood. Her father was her mentor who instilled the love and discipline needed to become a musician. At the age of 10, she made her first public appearance. After many years of rigorous training under her illustrious Gurus Prof. N.B. Kikani and Ustad Anwar Khan Saheb, she became the first woman to receive a music degree with a Gold Medal in the 75 years history of the Faculty of Fine Arts Baroda, India. She has received many awards, scholarships, and fellowships including at the age of 21, the first prize winner in the state of Gujarat for the stringed instrument competition held by All India Radio.
In her early twenties, she emigrated to the United States and has pursued music ceaselessly since then. Hasu plays the Sitar in a special style known as Gayaki Ang (Singing Style), in which the sitar replicates fluidity and subtle nuances of the human voice. This innovative technique, which is credited to her Guru Ustad Vilayat Khan Saheb of Imdad Khani Gharana, is the most significant contribution to her music inheritance.
She has performed the Classical Music of India known as Raga Sangeet (scientific, precise, subtle and aesthetic system of melodic notes accompanied with rhythm of tremendous vitality on Tabla, a pair of two drums) at various Performing Art Centers, Music Conferences, World/Jazz/Country music festivals such as Woodstock's 30th anniversary and Chicago Jazz festival, Universities, radio/television stations, churches/temples/meditation centers etc. around the country. She has conducted duets with Western classical and Jazz musicians, many residences/workshops/lecture demonstrations in schools and colleges, and has offered her unique talent to terminally ill patients in hospitals as a music therapy. She has also performed as a musician in Indian classical dance ensembles.
Hasu is affiliated with the Ohio Arts Council (Ohio Artists on Tour), Greater Columbus Arts Council, Mid-America Arts Alliance and International Alliance of Women in Music. Hasu teaches Sitar, Tabla, and Vocal music to many students at her Sursangam School of Music as well as credit hours course at Conservatory of Music at Oberlin College of Ohio.
"My Music, My Dream - It gives me an eternal pleasure when I teach the students and play before music lovers around the world. The more one plays, the more humility captivates one," says Hasu with much determination and joy. To her, Indian classical music is a rare and divine art, which calls for absolute dedication called sadhana.
Hasu's debut album Gayaki Sitar presents in bold Alap, improvisation which embodies the very essence of pure classicism. The music is spiritual and meditative, and rendered as such to bring forth the transcendental experience of the moods called rasas.
Web Site Address: www.hasupatel.com,
E-mail Address: [email protected]
REVIEW OF GAYAKI SITAR CD:
The Dutch magazine “Oor” would, from time to time, feature Indian music. So, in between all of the new releases from the worlds of metal, pop and rock there would regularly be a raving review of a recent Sitar-album, reminding you how wonderful this music was. These intermittant phases of enthusiams lead one to ask a simple question: Is there something like a raga-moment in everyone’s life?
The story of Hasu Patel is like a reversed answer to this question: Her life is one continous raga-moment and she has invested all of her power in letting the world know about it. Of course, we could take hours documenting her hard struggle to the top of her profession, about the hardships of growing up in India as a woman with promising musical talent and with an insatiable hunger for knowledge and responsability. But Patel is not one to loose too many words. It is through her playing that she literally “speaks” to her audience – it is not for nothing that her style is referred to as “Gayaki Ang” (vocal style), a technique seeking to approximate the voice of a singer with the Sitar. You can truly hear the strings weep, wail, exult, whisper and break, as well as making promises (and keeping them!). What has helped her in her quest is the immediate and universal understanding for classical Indian music all around the world (one can access these works without any prior knowledge and leave the exact meaning and studies of form and function to later) as well as her boundless creativity and yet love for simplicity in her thematic material. “Gayaki Sitar” is therefore an album, which quickly tears down the initial wall of reservations and serves as an inspiring introduction to the art, tradition and practise of ragas. Far from the esoteric vagueness of new age prophets, they tell very earthly stories of love and loss, of foreign lands and of beauty in the smallest of details, conveying a feeling of comfort and very basic human emotions – there is no need whatsoever of taking in the lotus position. On the other hand, it is a work which will be of great interest to the initiated as well, thanks to its unusual restriction to “Alaps”, the opening movements of a raga, which could be characterised as “expressive meditative moods”, which unfold the structure and texture of the entire composition in a tri-part series of melodic and rhythmical improvisations.
So allow yourself to be drawn in by the mysterious “Raga Darbari-Kanada”, be overwhelmed by the pastoral tranquility of the “Raga Yaman Kalyan” or rocked into a nervous grey zone by the feverishly ondulating “Raga Bhairavi”. You will soon find that there is a Raga moment in every day of your life.
By Tobias Fischer