Norwich Ragas: Slide & Strum on The Mystic Frets

St Andrew's Hall is on St Andrew's Plain, Norwich NR3 1AU, in the city centre, 950 metres from Norwich railway station, a walk of about 12 minutes. The bus station is also 950 metres away. The hall is part of The Halls, the name the venue uses for the complex.

From the railway station you can also take a bus to Castle Meadow, or a taxi from the rank outside the station.

Driving? See parking near the hall.

KalaSudha presents Indian classical music in Norwich and lists each concert on its Norwich page, with a link to book. For the next Norwich date, read how to hear about new Norwich concerts.

KalaSudha has presented concerts at St Andrew's Hall on St Andrew's Plain and at The Assembly House, a Grade I listed building on Theatre Street.

Giuliano Modarelli is a London-based Italian guitarist and composer who blends Indian classical music, jazz and contemporary world music. Born in Milan in 1977, he moved to England in 2000 and took a bachelor's degree in jazz at Leeds College of Music in 2003. He studied Indian music with the sitar player Dharambir Singh and the sarod players Buddhadev Dasgupta and Prattyush Bannerjee. He founded the collective Samay and the ensemble Kefaya, and he has worked with Ustad Shahbaz Hussain and Pandit Ajay Prasanna.

Pandit Debasis Chakroborty is a Hindustani slide guitarist and the senior-most disciple of Pandit Brij Bhushan Kabra, and his playing reflects Kabra's style. His name is also written Debasis Chakraborty. He plays in the Senia-Maihar gharana and has taught since 1992.

He has been part of the Department of Performing Arts at Mangalayatan University since its inception, and returns to universities in Australia and the USA as a conductor-performer and artist-in-residence. He helped carry out a joint music research project between Mangalayatan University and Monash University, and has published 10 research papers.

The Indian slide guitar is a guitar laid flat across the lap and stopped with a steel bar instead of fingers on frets. It is an instrument of Hindustani classical music, the classical music of North India. Sympathetic strings ring underneath the melody unstruck, and the player plucks extra drone (chikari) strings.

The bar never leaves the string, so one note travels into the next without a break. For its history and players, see the Indian slide guitar page. You can learn it with KalaSudha in the online academy.

The Senia-Maihar gharana is the sarod lineage that Allauddin Khan founded at Maihar, a former princely state, in the early 20th century. Most sources treat it and the Maihar gharana as one school spanning several instruments. "Senia" names the Tansen line, which Allauddin Khan joined as a disciple of Wazir Khan of Rampur. He brought a dhrupad approach to the sarod, sitar, violin and bansuri. Among KalaSudha's artists, Pandit Debasis Chakroborty plays in the gharana.