I believe my first experience of my future ustād was in California, through the signature jumbo yellow speakers of my mother’s eldest brother. I had previously heard the joṛī around 2004 in a Maryland school cafeteria—transformed for the day into a divān hall—where it accompanied Bhāī Avtar Singh’s rendition of an original paṛtāl of Gurū Ram Das in Rāga Kanaṛā. What initially struck me was the full-handed production of strokes, so unlike tablā nikās. The bols were recognizable—if somehow weightier—and I was fascinated to learn after samaptī that the secret to the joṛī’s magnificent bass is a fresh application of dough on the leather drumhead.
It was, however, Bhāī Baldeep Singh’s playing in Jori (2004) from Anād Records—especially his recitation—which enabled me to transcend my initial impressions of the instrument’s novelty, sparking reflection on the rich musical substance he presented, as I would later learn, as the head of South Asia’s oldest living school of classical percussion. My reflection continued ever since, and when I had the opportunity to ask Bhāī Gurcharan Singh about the joṛī in New Delhi in 2008, he declared that I must seek out none other than Bhāī Baldeep Singh—if I truly wished to learn the GurSikh tradition of percussion.
So when I came to meet my ustād-to-be in California a few days later (my thanks to Providence and my māsī), my appreciation for the extraordinary CD that I had heard figured prominently in our first conversation. With 2024 marking a full two decades since Bhāī Baldeep Singh’s release of Jori, the year’s final installment of The Vital Anjan is dedicated to reflecting on the achievements of this album. Beyond its being the earliest and the unsurpassed studio recording of the joṛī—not to forget its being played by the individual who recovered the instrument’s name, construction, playing techniques, repertoire, performance practices, oral history of its previous maestros, and philosophy of rhythm from the brink of extinction—Jori exemplifies the virtues of depth and clarity we as GurSikhs might profitably cultivate as a new year dawns in a rapidly changing world.
Jori’s Musical Substance
Comprising three tracks of approximately twenty minutes each, Jori offers an ebullient presentation of the percussive repertory of the Sultanpur Lodhi-Amritsari Bāj played on the joṛī-pakhāvaj. Śrī Somjit Dasgupta furnishes melodious accompaniment on a more than two hundred and fifty year old dhrupadī rabāb that belonged to a descendent of Miyān Tansen. While the display of percussive compositions overtop a looping melodic line whose duration equals one cycle of the tāla being played is generally understood as ‘solo’ playing, it would be a mistake to conceptualize the album as merely a joṛī-pakhāvaj solo. Rather, it is best understood as the kriyā of śān—literally ‘the glory’—which as per GurSikh maryāda must begin every kīrtan ćaunkī. This landmark publication united the joṛī and rabāb after an estimated separation of one and a half centuries, with the informative booklet in which the CD is encased reminding the listener that such playing of the śān was “once a daily spiritual experience at Darbar Sahib”. Fittingly, the album was released in celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of the 1604 prakāś of the Ādi Granth, in Amritsar.
It is noteworthy that rather than showing off a potpourri of the less commonly heard rhythmic cycles for which the Gurbāṇī Kīrtan Paramparā has preserved both dhrupads and pakhāvaj repertory—for instance Panćamsavārī (fifteen mātrās), Śikhar Tāla (seventeen mātrās), and Indar Tāla (nineteen mātrās)—Bhāī Baldeep Singh selected the twelve-beat Ćār Tāla, which is to joṛī and pakhāvaj what the sixteen-beat Tin Tāla is to tablā. What is more, he elected not to present the usual variety of increasingly sprightly layas, instead playing in a stately 60 beats per minute vilambit laya throughout the first track, increased slightly to 66 b.p.m. in tracks two and three. Consequently, the dramatic increase in the number of individual strokes executed per unit of time between the first and third tracks is less a function of change to the base tempo than it is a systematic presentation of repertoire in ascending multiples relative to the starting laya.
Given that even the fastest of compositions presented must then span the full duration of the initial tempo rather than cutting it—and thus the minimum length required of compositions—in half, Bhāī Baldeep Singh’s playing may be characterized as an hour’s worth of vilambit laya repertoire in Ćār Tāla. While the rāgas change (Gauṛ Sārang to Barvā to Bihāg), the playing itself represents the systematic progression of sāth compositions literally playable ‘alongside’ a Sabad-Rīt. This exacting approach to preserving the integrity of an established laya is characteristic of the dhrupad genre’s aesthetic philosophy, and Jori’s extensive treatment of distinct families of spectacular compositions is a testament to the civilizational richness of the Gurūs’ darbār.
As Bhāī Baldeep Singh has perceptively argued and the booklet concisely states, the four melodic sections of a dhrupad—asthāī, antarā, sanćārī, and abhog—are rhythmically “paralleled” on the drums with cheṛ, dugan, āṛ, and tigan repertoire. Hence the expansive arches of cheṛs in the first track are succeeded by columns of dugan bols in track two, followed by āṛ’s lilting lattices, tigan’s scintillating filigree, and the climactic explosion of mukās in track three. Throughout, Bhāī Sāhib produces percussive literature of the finest quality, largely eschewing the ubiquitous relā and chand padding he once wittily likened to ‘filibustering’. Where a cheṛ may not resolve for three, five, even eight āvartans of vilambit Ćār Tāla, this lapidary līlā demands, rewards, and cultivates highly refined aesthetic faculties in the listener.
GurSikhī and the Art of Beating Leather
In Bhāī Baldeep Singh’s masterful sabaq, I find a ‘lesson’ not only in drumming of the highest order, but also in the virtues of depth. If the vocation of learning is indeed to be central to our GurSikhī, we cannot be content to skim the surface, to leave our affairs half done. In our vićār, kirat, and sevā, we must delve fully and methodically into the inner logic of our assigned duties. Whatever is worth doing merits our complete attention; whatever does not is unworthy of our life.
Reflecting on Bhāī Sāhib‘s exultant recitation of bols, there also emerges the virtue of clarity, in its several forms. Consider the clarity that comes from having learned what is to be done, from honing the ability through devoted practice and removal of everything superfluous, and from thereby gaining the justified confidence that one will be able to deliver in the test of battle.
Then there is the clarity of jagaha—of knowing one’s exact location and having the presence of mind to make the most of it. In the first track at 7:23, Bhāī Sāhib gracefully picks up the recitation of a cheṛ halfway into the antepenultimate mātrā of the preceding āvartan. Yet in the distinctive idiom of the Sultanpur Lodhi-Amritsari Bāj‘s phraseology, I discern a still more existential clarity in the cheṛ he goes on to recite, diving into the depths of ‘Dūṃ’. How ‘Ke’ comes to life, how it breathes, how the surrounding silence becomes music!
The existence of such profound rhythmic constructs as ‘—Dhā –DīKe —N’ approaching and resolving into the sama are unimaginable to me absent the singular poetics of the Sultanpur Lodhi-Amritsari Bāj. If such rhythmic freedom emerges from walking the distinctive path of the Gurūs’ percussive silsilā, consider the clarity—the discernment, the bibek—that would emerge if one could silence the chatter of manmat for the wondrous instant it would take to perceive the whole through the Gurūs’ eyes!
A Remarkable Answer
2024 proved a year of many echoes, including tremendous losses. Punjab mourns the passing of two of its most virtuosic percussionists in Ustād Atlaf Hussain Tafu Khan (1945-2024) and Ustād Zakir Hussain Allarakha Quereshi (1951-2024), for whose guidance and graciousness I am eternally grateful.
Across the globe, Sikhs commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the Indian state’s 1984 attack on Darbār Sāhib, Amritsar. “We as a community, we as Sikhs have hit rock bottom,” my future ustād reflected as a teenager in that black year of genocide. “The question now is how do we recover?”
Released twenty years after Operation Blue Star, Jori furnishes an indispensable part of Bhāī Baldeep Singh’s answer. Rabāb and mridang were inseparable from Gurū Nanak’s understanding of kīrtan, as is attested within his Bāṇī and the odes of Bhāī Gurdas. Gurū Arjan Dev is remembered as having created the joṛī, so Jori transports us to the sonorities of kīrtan‘s instrumentation during the late sixteenth century.
What is at stake, then, is not an aesthetic predilection for historically informed performance over contemporary music. What we understand kīrtan to be has precisely the same onto-existential weight as what we understand GurSikhī to be, since it is in kīrtan that Sabad Gurū is most fully manifest.
As Bhāī Baldeep Singh recalled in an extended interview published in January 2022’s installment of The Vital Anjan, “I understood very early on that it [kīrtan] is the key element to salvage; my whole focus has been to recover the Gurūs’ song as it came. All jewels, all nectar is within Bāṇī. What would we be without it?”
I shudder to think what we would be absent Bhāī Baldeep Singh’s herculean efforts to safeguard Gurū Arjan Dev’s joṛī-pakhāvaj for posterity.
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Nihal Singh