Raag Megh | Music of India | Indian Slide Guitar, Piano, Sitar & Tabla | Kala Festival 2023
About This Video
Pandit Debasis Chakroborty (slide guitar), Lovely Sharma (sitar), Deepak Shah (piano), and Durjay Bhaumik (tabla) performed together at Kala Festival 2023, held at Norden Farm Centre for the Arts, Maidenhead, on 23 August 2023. The four-instrument ensemble of slide guitar, sitar, piano, and tabla is rare in Hindustani classical performance, and this concert brought the combination to a live UK audience for the first time under the KalaSudha banner.
Raag Megh belongs to the Kafi Thaat and is one of the monsoon ragas of the Malhar family. It uses only five notes, omitting Gandhar and Dhaivat, which gives the raga a wide, open geometry built on Shadja and Pancham. The characteristic phrase moves from Madhyama to a heavily oscillated Rishabh (the Andolan) before resolving down through Pancham and Nishad. The raga carries Vira and Bhakti rasa: forceful rather than tender, with a gravity that comes from its bare interval structure rather than melodic ornamentation.
Across the nine-minute performance, the four musicians trace the raga's arc from a restrained opening to a fuller, rhythmically driven section anchored by Bhaumik's tabla. Chakroborty's slide guitar sustains the long oscillations that define Megh's Rishabh, while Shah's piano fills the harmonic space with the raga's open fourths and fifths. Sharma's sitar carries the melodic line through the descent, and the ensemble converges in the final section where the interaction between the instruments, each voicing the same raga through a different physical idiom, is at its most concentrated.
