Raag Bhairav | Rekesh Chauhan & Shahbaz Hussain | Live | The Duke’s Hall

Rekesh Chauhan (piano) and Ustad Shahbaz Hussain (tabla) performed together at the London Ragas Fusion concert held at the Duke's Hall, Royal Academy of Music, London, on 15 November 2025. This was a two-artist set within a larger evening of Indian classical and fusion music, with Chauhan and Hussain taking the raga as the shared frame for their exchange.

Raag Bhairav belongs to the Bhairava thaat and is sung in the early morning hours. Its vadi is komal Rishabh and its samvadi is komal Dhaivat, the two flattened notes that give the raga its characteristic gravity and inward quality. Considered the adi-raga, the primordial raga, Bhairav carries a devotional weight that sets it apart from more expansive morning ragas. Its phrases do not move in straight ascending or descending lines but wind through the scale in vakra patterns, resisting any reduction to a simple modal scale.

On piano, Chauhan works within the tonal constraints of a fixed-pitch instrument, using touch and voicing to suggest the microtonal inflections Bhairav demands. Hussain's tabla provides both metric anchor and melodic response, his left hand's bayan tones shaping the bass register of the raga's mood. The performance opens with space and settles into a pulse that grows more insistent through the latter sections, the two instruments carrying the raga's devotional gravity through a Western concert hall.