Mohamed Assani: Transcript
Mohamed Assani:
And one stroke can create several notes (music) and then you can do rhythmic things. So like these strings I mentioned (music), you can combine horizontal and vertical playing like (music) and then the bass string for more robust kind of like sound like (music) that kind of thing.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman, and today's guest is the genre defying sitarist and composer Mohamed Assani. In this episode, a couple of compositions from his album Wayfinder are featured. Wayfinder incorporates a range of stylistic influences including South Asian Classical, Middle Eastern, jazz, funk, Western Classical, ambient, and electronic music. And it was produced by Juno and Emmy nominated producer Adham Shaikh. Mohamed is a wonderful educator based in Vancouver, Canada and teaching online, and I'm so grateful for him for being so gracious in agreeing to demonstrate on both sitar and tabla some basics of these instruments and of stylistic elements in South Asian music, for this episode. You can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast, and I've also linked the transcript to my website, LeahRoseman.com, where you can sign up for my weekly newsletter to get access to Sneak Peeks for upcoming episodes. This is the final episode for Season Three and Season Four launches January 6th. So do check out episodes you may have missed from the first three seasons. I'm an independent podcaster and I truly need the help of my listeners to keep this project going. You'll find a link in the description to help with that.
Hi Mohamed, thanks so much for joining me here today.
Mohamed Assani:
Listen, an absolute pleasure, Leah. Wonderful to be here speaking with you this afternoon.
Leah Roseman:
I do love South Asian music and I'm a particular fan of the sitar, so I'm so happy because you're actually the first sitar player I've had on this series, which features music from all over the world, so that's great.
Mohamed Assani:
Yeah, I'm delighted and honored to be here on your show.
Leah Roseman:
I was interested to learn that it was certainly not your first instrument. In fact, you started as an adult.
Mohamed Assani:
Yes, I started as an adult. Not many people know that my first instrument was the bass guitar. Then I was born in Pakistan and when I was 17 I became interested in Western music and it was the first time I heard it, Beethoven Symphony. And I thought, wow, this is mind blowing stuff. So I decided to study the piano and I traveled to England and I studied piano. And for the best part of my life I thought I was going to be a pianist. But then at my college I came upon this incredible sitar player who's, in my opinion, one of the best sitarists in the world and he happened to be a visiting lecturer at my college for one month. So that kind of influenced me and I thought, okay, maybe I should learn sitar. And it still took me a while after that to actually find a teacher. And then I started playing the sitar.
Leah Roseman:
So who was that that you heard?
Mohamed Assani:
It was Ustad Nishat Kahn. He belonged to, he was like a seven generation musician, so it's long lineage. And his family actually virtually carried the sitar from its inception to where it is now, and they've always been there at the forefront of it. Yeah, amazing. So I was fortunate to have that kind of exposure. And also in the West, not many people know. Ravi Shankar is more famous because of the Beatles, but a lot of the musicians admire this style of playing beyond any other style in instrumental music in India and Pakistan and the subcontinent. Yeah,
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I was wondering in terms of what we call it, because Hindustani is often the term used for the music of northern India, but of course people in Bangladesh and Pakistan play this music as well.
Mohamed Assani:
Excellent point, excellent point. India was a huge country before the British invaded, even parts of Afghanistan were incorporated and it was like an ever-changing map basically. And sometime it was bigger. It definitely was much bigger than it is now. Then in 1947, Pakistan, India became independent and as often happens with colonization, when there's a breakup, there's things break up into pieces, not just one whole country. The country's never the same. The fabric of the society has changed. So that led to a huge event in history in our recent history where India and Pakistan became separated including, and there are still repercussions of that tragedy that happened and we are still living in that now. But the musically speaking, you see India, Pakistan share north of India and Pakistan share the same heritage. Culturally we speak, I'm from Pakistan, I speak Urdu, in India, north of India, a lot of people speak Hindi.
It's exactly the same. Grammar vocabulary is slightly different. So we understand people from India and Indians from the north understand or the very widely spoken language. So musically as well, the heritage is the same. But what happened, unfortunately, politics comes into play and in India they adopted the instrumental music as a symbol of their nationhood and so on. In Pakistan, Pakistan embraced voice. So you got incredible vocalists from Pakistan, not so many instrumentalists that it's not that many government support, but in India there's a huge, huge infrastructure and thousands of people. But anyway, that's just a brief kind of backdrop. So again, I think that these terms are changing and recently I hear the word South Asian quite a lot because then it means that it means India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, which I think is a fair term. So I also use that term South Asian. And then more specifically what you mentioned, Hindustani is a very kind of specific, so it's not all of Indian music is just the North Indian music and North Indian music includes north of India from the past, which includes places like Pakistan and so on. So that's Hindustani music, same as South Asian music in the spirit that I was saying that it includes music from North India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and so on. I hope that's, explains.
Leah Roseman:
I'll just mention to my listeners. So previously on the series I featured a Carnatic violinist who lives in Mississauga, Subhadra Vijaykumar, and also one other Hindustani - well South Asian, musician who plays the bansuri, the flutes, Milind Date who actually we did the call from his home in Pune, India, which was kind of cool. Yeah. So let's get to the instrument before we go on to discuss other things. For those people watching the video, and I'll alert the podcast listeners to the fact that all these episodes are available on my YouTube channel.
Mohamed Assani:
So my instrument has 18 strings. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to tune it in front of you so you can get, it's already tuned, but I'm just doing some fine tuning. So I have a bass string, I have various accompanying strings. Now I have sympathetic strings. So I've tuned the top strings, which I have bass, drone. And then again I have tonic note, an octave apart. So these are the rhythmic string and drone string bass. Then I have the melodic string (music) underneath. I have sympathetic strings here.
And again, when I'm in a concert, it probably will take me three to four minute, five minutes to tune. If the weather is bad, then it might take longer. There's too much light. Also, these keys are kind of carved, so sometimes they slip. So you saw me when I was doing it, sometimes I have to put a lot of pressure, but you have to be on top of the tuning because when you have 18 strings to ike, oh, if it's a very well tuned harp, even when a mouse runs across, it'll create beautiful music. So in a way, I'm just in a joking way, sitar as well. The first thing is the tuning. Once the tuning is done really well, then the instrument speaks quite well. (music) And on my sitar, I can also play it vertically and horizontally. So I can play like a guitar (music), but I can play (music) bending. (music) So that's like a singing style. You are connecting two different notes in one phrase as if it was one breath. So this is a mizrab that I wear. It's a made of metal, and one stroke can create several notes (music)
And then you can do rhythmic things. So like these strings I mentioned,(music) you can combine horizontal and vertical playing (music) and then the bass string for more robust kind of sound. Like (music) that kind of thing. My hand needs to be warmed up.
Leah Roseman:
Well, thanks for that little demo. That's wonderful. So the curved frets, they were a later development in the instrument?
Mohamed Assani:
Yes, the curved frets are a later development. So a little bit about the history of the instrument is that there was a famous poet, he's also revert as a saint philosopher, musician, poet, and so on. His name was Amir Khusrau and his family had migrated from what is known as Afghanistan now to India. And there was a time during the Mogul rule in India, and before that there was a lot of migration from Central Asia into specifically north of India. And then north of India was also ruled by the Moguls, which were the Persian background. And so they were the biggest patrons of art in India. So the Indian music before 13th century was associated with religious music predominantly and folk music. But when the Moguls came, they kind of secularized music. Music was considered as a sacred entity. And so it became secularized.
And as you can see in their architecture, they were very much into arts and showing off basically. So if you look at the Taj Mahal was built by the Moguls and you can see emeralds and rubies and decadence and art and symmetry, and there's a lot of emphasis on beauty. And so it's known that at times there were more than 400 musicians from places like Afghanistan on the payroll of these kings who kind of patronized the music. And that continued until the British came. But when the mobile rule ended and then a lot of musicians were displaced, there was also another very interesting genre of music, which is called the Toongri. Toongri was in the beginning and still present day was mainly sung by female artists. But initially they were sung by courtesans and these courtesans - So the aristocrats in those days used to send their boys, I suppose, to these courtesans to learn about culture, to learn about music, to about poetry. These courtesans were very well versed in music, poetry and dance. And that evolved a beautiful musical genre where these courtesans were known for their singing and kind of appreciated for that. But these were all also again, displaced when the British came. So that's a very interesting history of how the music was and how the politics kind of changed it. But sitar was definitely patronized by the Moguls. So initially the sitar is like a Persian word, which means three strings.
But being in India since the 13th century, it incorporated a lot of influences from India and Indian music as well. So I would say that for me, sitar and North Indian music is a hybrid to me. It's got too many influences. So for example, if I tell you about sitar, I can play something like raag Shyam, which is Shyam is also no name of a god in Hinduism, but I'm playing with a mizrab, which is an Arabic word. Sitar is a Persian word. And what I play, there are so many amazing influences that work together in this sphere of music from South Asia, the classical music. So to me, sitar has influences and it's a hybrid instrument. So coming back to the curves flat, yeah. So I mentioned to you Nishat Khan, who was the artist that I was fortunate to spend a month with, his uncle, his father's brother, brought this invention not that long ago. So you can see the fret, the frets are curved and I can put my finger underneath that there's a gap, and that's what gives me the ability to actually slide. So I can do (music)or I can do (music).
So that's about the frets, it changes the game because the whole repertoire that I play is very lyrical. There's a lot of, yeah, so you can see I'm bending a lot of the notes when I'm doing this. Yeah,
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, that's what I love so much about that instrument. Now you played the tabla before you learned the sitar.
Mohamed Assani:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
And do you still teach some tabla?
Mohamed Assani:
I teach tabla, yeah, I teach tabla. I also teach very intense courses on the use of rhythm in composition and in your playing, because whatever I do rhythmically, I can do it on the sitar,
I think. Because one thing in this style of music, you learn the instrument, you learn everything, but then you move into micro beats and so on. And that makes it really interesting. So for example, we use 16 beats cycle a lot in classical music. So one thing that we do is that we working, or even if we worked in eight beats, what we do is we use half notes. So then we end up with 16 notes in eight beats. And then it's just like, how do you set those things up? You can do it very evenly or you can do something like, so I'm doing seven and 9, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, these kind of thing. You can, I do that and I also do a lot of these things. This is an oral tradition, which means that the actual manifestation is best experienced once it's internalized. If it's in my head, if I understand every nook and corner of a phrase that where this Ta or Din stroke comes and I'm feeling that, then when I'll act deliberately will have that integrity and it'll be whole for me to coming out as a whole. But if there is doubt or something in my mind, it's not going to sound great. So the aim is that whatever we do, whether it's a sitar or a tabla, we internalize the music as an oral tradition and it's easier to explain with rhythm. So what we do is we use our hands as a measure. So like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, this is 16 beat one, two, and the division is on 5, 6, 9 is a big bit, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16.
So this kind of helps this actually motion saying and thinking about it. So that's one way of very simple example of internalizing the music. And then once you have this measure, then you can try different permutations. I mean this music is all about permutations. We don't have key changes, we don't have many other aspects that you would have in a sonata form or so on. We have mostly endless variations.
Leah Roseman:
And when you're teaching the rhythm, do you have all your students vocalize first before they touch the drums?
Mohamed Assani:
Yes, yes, yes. Vocalize is absolutely, they have to know. So just like a C sharp on a piano, when you ask somebody, this is a C sharp, this is an E flat or this is a D, they would know This is Sa, this is Re, this is Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni Sa. Like, Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, we have Sa.
Leah Roseman:
Aren't those the names of the notes though? I meant the rhythms.
Mohamed Assani:
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Rhythm. I'm just interchanging with rhythm and yeah, it's the same thing for as an example I give you. So on tabla, do you want me to show it to you on the tabla?
Leah Roseman:
Oh, if you would!
Mohamed Assani:
Okay, give me a second.
Leah Roseman:
That'll be thrilling. Sure!
Mohamed Assani:
Yeah, yeah, sure. With these instruments, the tuning is always takes it times, but (music) it will kind of do. So (music)
Mohamed Assani:
One second,
Mohamed Assani:
It's cold. (music) So I have names if you want to have a look here.
Leah Roseman:
Perfect, thank you.
Mohamed Assani:
So, this is the right hand drum. This is the left-hand drum. So left hand is the bass, right hand is a treble. So for example, if I'm doing, there are three parts on the table. This is the black spot, which is called Syahi. Syahi means black and it's made of iron, dust and other stuff is hard. The middle stuff is skin. And then the outer ring is also skin. Each has different sonorities. For example, the middle one is very resonant, the most resonant, it's quite a sustained. And then the inner circle is crisp, more kind of short. The outer one is more crisp. So sort of these are the rhythms that we do. So this stroke is called, Te, Te, Tun and when you put them together it becomes Ta(music) , so that's the tabla, and the stroke. So obviously we get the students to chant the rhythms, play and it so phonetically should sound the same. If I'm saying Te Te (music) , it should be Dhin (music) . So that's the idea.
Mohamed Assani:
Wonderful.
Mohamed Assani:
Like the notes (music) and the sitar note, is it for tuning? I have this thing here as well. I don't know if you can see, it's like a small bird.
Leah Roseman:
Yes.
Mohamed Assani:
So this is for fine tuning. So as you can see, I left the sitar. Now every time I go back to sitar, I have to tune again a bit (music) These are the adjustments that we have to do.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a short break from the episode, which I hope you're enjoying so far. If you want to check out over a hundred episodes you may have missed in addition to your podcast player or YouTube, I have an extensive website, leahroseman.com with show notes, transcripts, the complete catalog of episodes, and you can sign up there for my weekly newsletter to get access to Sneak Peeks of upcoming guests. Please do share your favorite episodes with your friends, follow me on social media and share my posts. And if you can spare a few dollars to help support the series, that would be amazing. And you can find that link in the show notes. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. Now, back to the episode.
There's so many places we could go. I was curious, I know you do as well as teaching at university, you sometimes do school residencies in Vancouver where you live. And I was interested to see that it's not just you just don't go and play. You have them participate and you have them do things like body drumming. Can you talk a little bit to that kind of outreach?
Mohamed Assani:
Yes, absolutely. I feel that anytime I'm working with anybody, whether it's children or adults or musicians, the only way that I can get any satisfaction or I know that what I'm saying is making any sense, is to do something with the participants because, and it's fun. So I believe strongly working, and I've been in many situations where I've gone to a place for residency up there for two days, sometime a day, sometime three days. And we always end up with a nice, somehow it just happens. You get a good performance out of everybody, and I perform with them. And I think that's the best way to, if I was a child and if I could learn something and then apply that skill at the same time or with the person who's an expert, I think that's why not do that. I mean, that's a great way of, in education, I think it's really important, the cognition, you don't realize until it's actually done. Like speaking, one can study many books. But when you live in a country where a language is spoken, that's where you really start to make sense of how to speak and get confident. Music is the same that by doing it with the experts, even in my teaching tradition, my teachers emphasize that just play with me. Even a scale, just play with me. For half an hour I would do that. My teacher would just play scale and I'm just doing plain scale, simple things, but so much knowledge is transmitted. We don't realize it, but those subtleties actually happen in those moments when our brain is not really dissecting or analyzing the form, but we are just absorbing. We are just becoming one with that energy. So I really think that's a very important aspect of being in a musical environment and absorbing it. It's all about exposure in music, like a language.
Leah Roseman:
Yes. I was thinking you'd want to speak about your album Wayfinder and maybe some of your other recorded projects.
Mohamed Assani:
Yeah, yeah. I'm currently working on my next recording, which is, so basically I trained in western classical music as I mentioned to you that I played piano and then I went to study and then at some point I realized, oh, I've done a full circle. Now I can actually use what I learned in Western music and in South Asian music and as a composer use both, which I love. So my music is informed not by one genre. I'm not a single genre person. I delve into many different genres, consciously, unconsciously, I don't think like that. I think whatever comes to me naturally. When I was in Karachi as a 13, 14-year-old, I used to listen to Bee Gees like crazy. I thought it's the best thing ever. These things have influences on you and many others, Stevie Wonder and so on. And so music I think is should be that way. It's open frontier. You can go from one place to another. And so in my music, that's a lot of that. In my album Wayfinder, it has actually electronic grooves and beats a lot as well, because I don't know if you can see, this is my pedal board. Can you see that?
Leah Roseman:
Yes.
Mohamed Assani:
Yeah. So I use technology. I don't like AI, but I love things like gadgets and things like that that actually can, that's still what a human does, and we can kind of change that somewhat. So you'll find in my album, influences of harmony, electronic sounds, traditional South Asian, but all the compositions are my own. I've composed this music.
Leah Roseman:
Actually, I did want to speak to you about Lullaby for Guli, and maybe if you want to speak about your late mother and her, you say, I think in the album that she, what did you say that her story shaped the way you see the world?
Mohamed Assani:
My mother used to tell me funny stories and she used to sing a lot to me, and she used to sing lullaby. And then many years after, I realized that how much knowledge, it's not only the love and care, I mean obviously that's at the heart of everything a mother does in my experience, but there's a lot of wisdom, funny. It shapes your character in some ways. Your mom tells your funny story, a profound story, stories about moral stories about what's right. So those things shape you in many ways. And my mother passed away in 2014, and I had spent a lot of time being away from home, so I felt really bad. There's a lot of guilt on me that, oh, I could have spent this amazing time that's never going to come back. And it took me four or five years to get some sort of acceptance. During that time I wrote this melody called Lullaby for Guli, and I thought that why don't me as a son write lullaby for mothers? Because mothers are the ones who always sing generously the lullaby. So I thought, I want to dedicate this to my mother and to all mothers. So that was the story about lullaby and that piece, A lot of people still say, well, that's my best work. And then I made a video of that.
Leah Roseman:
Yes, I've seen it. Yeah.
Mohamed Assani:
And the video has been now featured in the South Asian International Film Festival. It was played in a big screen in September this year. I've just been to a screening in Toronto of this as well. And then it was selected as a runner up in Film House Festival in Berlin. So it's getting some attention and airtime, which is, and screening. So I'm happy about that.
Leah Roseman:
Be interested. I could share part of that as part of this episode.
Mohamed Assani:
Please share a part of the episode, the video. That'd be amazing.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. You're about to hear an excerpt from Lullaby for Guli: Tribute to Mothers. The original complete video is linked in the show notes and the audio is on Mohamed Assani's album, Wayfinder. (music).
And also on the album, I really enjoy Transit, actually, I like the whole album, but it might be in terms of clips we could include. Do you want to speak to that at all?
Mohamed Assani:
Yeah, so Transit is basically, I mean, sometimes we talk about the world, oh look, there is this migration happening, there's this happening, there's this happening. But then I sometimes think that, well, it's so always happened, it's nothing new. We have migrated, how did we end up in Canvan in the first place? So we've already migrated. Yes, I've migrated in 2010. So I'm just thinking that migration, it's like a constant story. The birds are migrating this and that. I'm thinking that we migrate, but instruments are also migrating, right? An art form migrates as well. And then what happens to that art form? In my case, I think I'm open to absorbing. So since I came to Canada, I became interested in electronic music before. I wasn't really doing much electronic music as such, electronic, not in the of high art, electronic music, I mean electronic music in terms of me using doors and gadgets and things like that.
So Transit is a reflection of migration. We are in transit all the time. And there's an interesting video that as well of Transit on YouTube as well that I did. And it is kind of fast paced. So Transit has a lot of influences and a lot of fast rhythmic things. And then the melody is traditional of that piece, but it's really adapted to stretch and show this kind of some sort of movement that it goes out from its original form. Often I start in this Raaga called {} but then I completely go into in a very different direction. So you'll see the mode change dramatically, which something doesn't happen in Raga music. Raga music starts with a certain Rag and stays in that raga throughout. But you'll see a lot of variety in that sense.
Leah Roseman:
This next excerpt is from Transit, which is from the album Wayfinder.(music)
And since you put out that album in 2022, you had this beautiful single Solace.
Mohamed Assani:
Yeah, Solace I really like, basically I really love. So basically I'll just show you the tuning for Solace. I mean, tuning is always going to take time. So this is a scale, (Music) so five notes, pentatonic, but it's a very different sort of pentatonic from, we have a tonic (music) minor second, then fourth (music) , fifth and sixth (music). So it's omit the second and the seventh (music).
So I find that it's a very pensive kind of rag. It's called Gunakari. It's a very pensive. I like the space between the notes and it just evokes - sometimes like a rag, this itself leads to a melody that there only so many places you can go. But then one thing that I did that it's called a Nine Beat Cycle that I also really love. And for many years as a musician, I would just declare myself as a failed musician because I could not play in seven beats. Or I thought, oh, if I play in four beats, everybody does that. Why can't I play an eight and a half beat? Or why can't I do nine Beat or this and that? And these are really your ego talking to you. And also in South Asian, Indian, classical Hindustan music, there's a lot of that, oh, I'm playing something in eight and a half beats or I'm doing this. And people will, there's a lot of people kind of mystified a lot.
But when you come down to it, when you learn it, then there's no mystery to, it's just like doing the act of doing. And often if somebody's saying, I'm playing an eight and a half beat, they're not really playing in an eight and a half beat. So for example, if I say nine beats, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1. So I'm playing six and then I'm playing three, but I'm doing it double speed. So it sounds like the total math is like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1 that was nine beats. Right. Okay. So I'm cheating in that sense. I'm not cheating. It's just the way the rhythm is structured. The last three beats are broken into 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. So that's easy to feel. But if I was to actually take it as just one beat, then it becomes very difficult to do nine beads or nine and a half or eight and a quarter. So we use this thing called Sawari, which is these little kind of phrases, riffs,
Which is easy to do. The riff is they, now they, that's the riff. 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, then I'm playing six. (singing) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. So it's not quite nine beat in the sense that I'm not doing, not every beat is equal. That's what I'm trying to say. The last three beats are at double speed. So I'm just saying is that when you don't know these things, you think, oh, it's impossible. How do I do that, this and that? You challenge yourself, but obviously if nobody tells you, then you're not going to, you can't do. So it's no point beating yourself. So one thing that I found from learning this music is that it's all very scientific, it's all doable. There's no mysticism. The mysticism comes from your spirit, how you present that thing. But the actual thing is just as tangible as anything.
Leah Roseman:
Now you'll be hearing an excerpt from Solace with the Tabla player, Ustad Shabaz Hussein and Mohamed Assani. (music)
Mohamed Assani:
In Western music, you can analyze Sonata form to no end, but you cannot analyze Beethoven's spirit. I dunno. Sounds cheesy, but that's what I am trying to say
Leah Roseman:
For sure. Yeah, Mohamed, I was thinking, I mean this came up with another guest recently, Michael Bridge, the accordionist. I was asking him about the intuitive versus the analytical, because the accordion is a very technical instrument. They have to sort of set things up ahead of time. But I think with all, when you're learning and teaching and playing music, there's really both sides that get engaged at different times, right? The analysis and the intuitive.
Mohamed Assani:
Yeah. Yeah. It is a bit like driving One thing that, oh, how does one drive you just panic. What the hell if that didn't go right. But we drive without thinking. I mean, we do think we see, but we are not constantly analyzing all this. It just happens, I think when you spend a lot of time with an instrument like accordion with complex figuring all these chords. But I think from the act of doing it and doing it, and it just happened to still this day, sometime when I'm going on this day, I'm saying that, what if I don't remember this? Or what if I don't? But somehow our brains are better than we give them credit for. They somehow get us through.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, you've played with this Tabla player, he must be your friend, Shahbaz Hussain. He's on all your albums, but he lives in Europe.
Mohamed Assani:
He lives in London, in near Manchester, in a town called Rochdale.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. So has he come over to Vancouver for your
Mohamed Assani:
He's over many a times, and I'm actually hoping to get him over this year as well. An absolutely fantastic tabla player. When he plays, and by the way, he sings on Solace, So the voice that you hear is him. He's one of those rhythm players who is so melodic in every single way. And his knowledge of Raga is next to anybody I know. He will know about every so melodically, he knows so much. He's a tabla player, and I often tease him, I said, give up Tabla either play, sing or place it out. Because he's so capable. But anyway, that's a joke. So I worked with him. He really inspires me. Fantastic tabla player. He's learned from three different teachers. So sometimes there are taboos like that, oh, you must have one teacher.
Your teacher will be so upset if you even dare to look at another teacher. But things are changing. He was fortunate to go to three different teachers. He went to a very legendary teacher called Ustad, {} from Pakistan, and he lived with him for like six, seven years. He also learned from Ustad Faiyaz Khan from Delhi in India and who visited frequently in England. So he's groomed by these two amazing. And for a short time, he also learned from Zaklir Hussain's father Ustad Allah Rakha Khan. So three of the best Ustads in music. So that shows in his playing. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And you got to know him when you were in England?
Mohamed Assani:
Yeah, I lived near him. So I've known him for the last 20 years. And then gradually we started playing, and then by the time I was coming to Canada, we've become too close. He was like my best friend. So I missed him a lot so that I brought him. But musically, from both point of view as a friend and as a musician in musically, he, in my opinion, he's in the top 10 tabla players in the world. There are a lot of tabla players in the world.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, that's wonderful. I know you participated, actually, you were sort of one of the lead people in the 80th birthday celebration, the Aga Khan, and that concert's on YouTube. I watched part of it.
Mohamed Assani:
That was really a moving experience. And so we arrived in Paris, and then we had about five or six days. So on the first day, I think there were 19 musicians from different parts of the world, from Syria, from Canada, from Afghanistan, from France, from the UK. And everybody was different. Everybody brought different instruments or voices, and we had to come up with one piece, one piece, which had a combination of other pieces in it. So we all had ideas. I suggested that why don't we break ice and give two, three minutes to each artist they sing or perform for everybody. Then we know what palette we have for this amazing thing. And it was a journey. People cried, people got excited, people got upset, and so on as humans do, we are humans. And in the end we got a seamless piece that was about 24 minutes. And the last piece was instrumental piece that I led. Within that, you'll hear sitar, you'll hear rebab, you'll hear a saz from Tajikistan and beautiful voices and percussions, and you'll hear Sarah, she lives in Calgary. She's an amazing jazz drummer. She plays on it as well. So we had fun. It was quite, I like these kind of situations that you are thrown into a situation. It's completely unknown. It was completely unknown. We didn't know how it was going to be. And we had 27 ideas, and I believe four were selected in the end.
Leah Roseman:
Okay,
Mohamed Assani:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
You studied Ashraf, Sharif Khan
Mohamed Assani:
Sharif Khan. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So I'm assuming it was kind of traditional way of studying it.
Mohamed Assani:
When I mentioned that I used to play scales with my Ustad, that was with Ustad Sharif Khan. He would, so basically what I studied for not very long time my exposure to, but he would just get me and get me to sit and play with him repetitively. And in his word, he would say that, look, I'm transforming my energy to you, literally. And I felt that he was taking me to an intensity that I had never experienced before. And they were the simple things. Anytime that somebody wants to play something really fast and you're struggling, breathe a bit, you'll find a remarkable kind of like, okay, you regain your composure a bit. So these kind of small things that are huge in my opinion. Yeah. So I studied with him. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
I was wondering if the way you teach is how is it different or how is it informed by your mentors?
Mohamed Assani:
Yeah, I am a rebel, by the way. So my teachers would tell me something. I always interpret it in my own way, in a way. And when I teach, I think I have my own way of teaching. And also because when I went to England, I was on a degree course, and honestly I'd only learned about Mozart and Beethoven like six, seven months before. And then I had to deal with reading music, which I still find it challenging because it's not something that I took on as a child. So reading, I can read, but I'm not like, okay, give it to me. Especially when you read on Sitar, it's even crazier because it's too much. So what I'm saying is that I then find my own ways to get around it basically. And my musical training has anything but normal. I would say it's different. I feel that any situation I've been there, it was different. I don't know how to explain that. But I didn't go through the traditional, traditional, traditional. Although yes, I have done traditional, I studied traditional Western classical music. I studied traditional Hindustani music, but my entry into that wasn't a typical.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. And if people want, I forget the name of, oh yeah, Spirit of Tradition. You do have an album if people want to hear traditional, yeah,
Mohamed Assani:
Traditional music. Yeah, with Shahbaz. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
There's a quote, I think it might be on your website where you say that when you learned that sitar, it helped you with your relationship with yourself, it taught you patience. So maybe just to close out this conversation, could you reflect on that a little bit?
Mohamed Assani:
Yeah, I think it's like when you learn one thing in your life seriously, and you dedicate and you think about it, it kind of what reflects back at you are other things in your life where you could improve or where you're not improving. And then you can see, or at least that you kind of start to understand who you are. So sitar to me will always be a challenge, right? Music is bigger than us, I believe. So if I can do something like that, what do I learn from it? It just gives me a lot of things to reflect about me as a person. We have a common saying that this is an oral tradition and everybody's playing the same rag. They're taught similarly in a way of a traditional composition. A tabla will come, it's very scripted exactly what's going to happen. It's going to end with the rhythmic thing at the end, but everybody plays very differently.
And it's the personality that comes out in a music like this. So your own personality. So then you are forced to think about it that okay, this is me Mohamad playing sitar. Am I agitated a lot? Am I rushing through things? Those are the dialogues that a musician has in this kind of style of music. Why is it not having an effect? I'm playing the right notes. The rhythm is right. There is a doubt. Is that doubt in my personality? So you start having these kind of conversation with yourself, and once you accept that whoever you are is going to show on the stage, and that happens, right? So then maybe you start fine tuning some aspects of yourself. Maybe if I am not breathing, I'll start breathing. Maybe I have some nervousness. So then you figure out ways of being in a nutshell, you start actually looking at yourself as well as the music and try to make that connection between yourself and the music. And I think that's the only time when the music happens, when you are connected, when your soul is connected, and when you are not in your ego is somewhat. Yeah,
Leah Roseman:
Beautifully said. I can't agree more. And I'll just tell listeners, you have done this wonderful series that I think it's linked on your website for CBC radio, South Asian music segment I guess, and history and culture. And I've started to listen to them. Really fantastic resource. Thank you
Mohamed Assani:
So much. Thank you. Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
So thanks so much for this today.
Mohamed Assani:
My absolute pleasure. My absolute pleasure. Leah, wonderful to speak with you.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode with Mohamed, and I wanted to let you know that this is my final episode for season three and season four launches January 6th. Please sign up for my newsletter at Leahroseman.com to get access to Sneak Peeks for upcoming episodes and share your favorite episodes with your friends. I normally say have a great week, but I'll take this opportunity to say best wishes for 2024, and do check out my back catalog for episodes you may have missed over seasons one through three.
