Travel Day 886 – Kolkata, INDIA
Today was the big day of the final Tablaphilia concert and this time it was set to be on stage in the Indian music capital Kolkata…
Tablaphilia Concert in Kolkata, India
The day actually started as all the other concert days with the only benefit that we didn’t have to be at the meeting point at 6am in the morning. The concert venue for once turned out to be actually quite close to my hostel and not in southern Kolkata as most other in-town concerts did, but we still had to get all the Tablas to the place somehow…
Thee taxis packed with Tablas was the predicted solution, but unfortunately we could only convince one single taxi on the street to do the trip with our equipment and so we ended up convincing the nice guy to do three trips back and forth with us and the musical instruments. Obviously this procedure took a lot longer than initially anticipated, but eventually we made it safe and sound to the concert venue with all the Tablas in reasonable condition…
The remaining afternoon time was then filled with stage preparations and extended sound checks. Every single time it seemed to be quite a challenge to coordinate the sound of in this case 24 Tablas and to make them sound well individually as well as in concert with each other. But luckily after a lot of back and forth everything got done just in time to lift the curtain for the opening act of the evening…
The first act was a female singer who did the music for the movie Midnight’s Children, followed by my teacher accompanying a really good Sitar player. The main and final act was then set to be the last performance of Tablaphilia, conducted by my teacher. As it was to be expected, after three concerts this was clearly the best performance and it was held in front of the biggest audience in the nicest venue of all the ones I had been to lately. So it was overall a great success and really good finale of Tablaphilia…
Part of my Tablaphilia Family in Kolkata
While I thought that it was quite a shame that this was the last performance of Tablaphilia already, something else seemed to be quite a shame as well. While listening to the concert, I became quite aware of the fact that after a couple of weeks of Tablaphilia, this was also the last time that I would see all the players who had almost become part of my family here. From now on we would go off in different directions and I could only hope that our paths would cross again at some pointin the future…
The same was true for my teacher as he was leaving the country today as well. After one intense month together, it was finally time to part ways and look up for what was ahead. So this last day of Tablaphilia ended up being a good concert day, but a sad one at the same time…
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