After a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic, the Serendipity Arts Festival (SAF) 2022 is back in Goa. Scheduled from December 15 to 23, the fifth edition promises to be a showstopper with hundreds of performances. A line-up of immersive and interdisciplinary programmes has been put together by a panel of curators across disciplines from performing, visual to culinary arts and crafts including Quasar Thakore Padamsee for theatre and Geeta Chandran and Mayuri Upadhya for dance.
Within the seven disciplines, Bickram Ghosh and Ehsaan Noorani will curate music for the festival with a wide range of live concerts spanning classical, folk, indie pop, and rock. Ghosh, noted classical tabla player, continued to be prolific through the pandemic by releasing music on audio platforms and OTT. Here he highlights key acts from Serendipity with The Week alongside pausing to reflect on the reinventions that the music industry underwent in the last two years.
How do you feel Covid impacted the independent music industry and how much of it has recovered?
There is no doubt that Covid impacted almost every industry, but music performance was very badly hit. Even top artists didn’t have shows for two years. Obviously, that was a humongous setback, but interestingly human beings are creatures of invention and reinvention. I think the music industry reinvented itself very quickly. Even during the pandemic, I can speak for myself, and many others, who were doing online shows. I did quite a few online shows and even, in fact, we recorded the shows in auditoriums with camera shoots. Those shows were bought by the audience!
The music industry was also producing a lot of content for streaming platforms. I think now things are back to normal and in some ways after living without the wonderful pleasure of going out and listening to music, audiences are thronging themselves back into the theatres. Interestingly, today after the whole wheel of reinvention, we are doing a large number of shows which are live. But we are still doing some online shows and online content. So, all of this together has resulted in a bigger market, one the live market and two, the digital market.
With cultural festivals like Serendipity back on the ground, how is likely to benefit the overall ecosystem of the music industry?
Serendipity is an iconic festival, which has gained fame in a very short period of time. It is a festival that encompasses many forms of art. Music is a very important part of the artistic texture of Serendipity. I think it is great news for music and art in general that Serendipity is back on the ground and it already receiving tremendous response. I think festivals like Serendipity, psychologically, give a big boost to musicians in the way they feel and are an assurance that everything is okay now, where we can all go and perform freely. It’s a big festival where there are 2,000 performances. I feel very happy and honoured to be curating the music for it along with Ehsaan Noorani.
Some interesting acts you would like to highlight this year at Serendipity?
I would like to go by the highlights of my own curation for Serendipity. First, Ricky Kej who has won his second Grammy this year. There is a wonderful classical fusion featuring Purbayan Chatterjee, Taufiq Qureshi, Rakesh Chaurasia on flute, Ojas Adhiya on tabla. There’s the act that I am not just curating but also participating in, which is called Kings of Percussions. I am also playing in that and it features Shivamani, myself, and Selvaganesh. It promises to be a very high-energy act. I would also like to highlight Sufi folk, which is a wonderful confluence of Sufi and folk music from across the nation featuring the wonderful Sufi kawals, Parvati Kumari, and the brilliant Kalpana Patowary on folk vocals. There is this show which is very close to my heart called ‘The World of Pancham’, which features the great R.D. Burman’s numbers played by people who were actually his team of musicians. There’s a synergy between screen and stage here in the show, which we are trying to make as seamless as possible. Besides, there is Sanjay Mandal and the thrown waste, which is a fantastic act with the scrap material and the kids from the street. There’s River Raga, where there are 9 acts featuring several very good younger-generation classical artists both from north India and south India featuring vocal and instrumental music.
Going forward, how will the production and consumption of music change in India after this long spell of inactivity when so many people took to appreciating music a lot more?
I think the one big thing that people have realised is how much they missed music during these two years, which is why literally every show is getting a fantastic response from the audience. I did a festival called ‘Naav’ earlier this year and it was overflowing with people. Another takeaway is that music consumption digitally has increased many-fold. It is a big change because it means, we too, as artists have to cater to that segment. I am creating a lot of music in the studio now, releasing it both on YouTube and streaming platforms. Besides this, film for OTT is a big space and I do a lot of film scoring. A lot of digital platforms are going to become very big in the near future and we as artists have to be prepared for that.