Pandit Rajmani Tigunait

Circa British Rule in India, a man vows to make his only surviving son, Narayan, alias Nani, a Brahmachari to atone for the deaths of five of his children. He takes this child to a remote village in Karnataka, South India, where he leaves his 11 year old son in the care of a learned Archarya, Udup Pandit. Here Nani gets to meet two other disciples of the Archarya, as well as his widowed daughter, Yamuna, and another male by the name of Shrikar Upadhyay, who also teaches the British how to read and write in Hindi. The Archarya goes away for a few days, and when he returns nothing is the same anymore. His daughter is pregnant, the villagers are all set to remove her from the village, they are also angry with him for refusing Yamuna to follow the traditional way a Hindu widow. The Archarya must now find out who impregnated his daughter - whether it was one of his two young disciples; an untouchable male named Koga Pandit, or was it young Nani. The Archarya must also decide what is to be done with Yamuna as it is up to him now to decide her fate, not that he has many choices - for the prescribed Hindu punishment for this is - death.

Video lessons of playing the tabla from Pandit Sadanand Naiampalli. This course designed for musicians with level from Intermediate to Advanced. At the beginning of the disc is given a brief "alphabet" (bols) to record the rhythms (taals). At the beginning of each chapter before playing taals described appropriate bols. Video and audio quality is certainly not great. But publishers of disk are put a lot of cool stuff.

As a teenager, percussionist and composer Payton MacDonald became fascinated with the tabla, an Indian instrument consisting of two drums, a smaller one with a wooden frame, and a larger one with a metal or ceramic frame. His interest continued through his graduate studies at the Eastman School of Music, and eventually led him to study with tabla master Pandit Sharda Sahai. He has also worked extensively with Canadian tabla player Shawn Mativetsky, who performs six of MacDonald's works on this CD. Three are solos and three are concertos for tabla and percussion quartet. The concertos are placed before the solos, but the listener new to the instrument may want to listen to the solos first to become familiar with the tabla's versatility.