CHENNAI: For musicians, the search for soul, emotions and sounds remains constant in their life even with the developments in terms of instruments, songs and styles of performances. In his quest, Tharun Sekar revived the yazh — an ancient Tamil instrument — a few years back.
Slowly, he found similar interest in his friends and the team of six musicians formed a band called Uru Paanar, named after their studio Uru - Custom Instruments, which revives old musical instruments, in January this year. The team was recently selected for Production Grant for Independent Musicains 2023 by the Serendipity Arts Foundation which allows them to perform during the Serendipity Arts Festival in December 2023 in Goa.
Creative curation
Starting a band has been in the ideation stage for almost four years. Tharun, Pravekha Ravichandran and Keerthirathan already had a band together. Siva Subramanian, Kumar Shaw and Suraj Shankar later joined to form Uru Paanar.
In February 2023 they gave their first performance at Alt+Art Festival. Siva, a vocalist and lyricist says, “It is a band formed by musicians from different backgrounds with the idea of re-inventing old instruments. The intent is to fit these instruments in today’s world. Revival is not just about the instruments, it is also about what you do with it. We are also in the path of exploring the sounds of the past and also experimenting in making it more live and relevant.”
The band also serves as a vehicle for highlighting Tharun’s recreation of the instruments of the past era. “The combination of yazh, kuzhal, kudamazha being used for marriages and dance performances has found its mention even in Silappatikaram. All these instruments and their sounds provide us a chance to explore the relationship between humans and nature. Keerthirathan and Suraj have been learning and practising music in the traditional way. The rest of us know music in an emotive and expressive way. All of us coming together to create music has now become a balance,” says Tharun.
Apart from yazh, they also include sounds from kudamuzha, urumi, kanjira, salangai, magudam and parai. Pravekha, a vocalist and lyricist shares, “We have general and landscape songs. The music is like a time machine. There are different sounds for different landscapes. There are certain instruments which are only performed during a certain time. It is a fascinating process to push the boundaries of the sounds of the past and move towards the future.”
Explaining the specific sounds of different landscapes, Siva says, “We have different landscapes like kurinji (mountains), mullai (forests), marutham (cropland), neithal (coastal) and palai (dry lands). The landscape of coastal areas has an emotion of death. It explores death through oppari. In palai, desert regions where the land is dry and livelihood is hard, the emotion is abandonment. We try to write songs and compose music according to these emotions.”
Preserving the culture
Revival can be a tricky business when there is a fear of dilution of the essence of the original sound. Since there is no reference for most of the sounds, we use our imagination for exploration, notes flautist Suraj. To take Tamil language and culture to more people, the team also hopes to collaborate with native musicians. Even though there is a curiosity in everyone to see their live performance and the responses from the audience have been positive so far, the team shares that it can be challenging to conduct on-stage performances on a regular basis as they are still in the process of learning.
“In terms of performance, the travelling and bringing all the instruments together is expensive,” says Siva as Tharun adds, “Tuning all the instruments and balancing the sounds between them is a task and it takes a bit of a time. While performing, we use this time for storytelling. We explain the history, the landscape and the emotion, so that people can connect to the music.
Since we don’t have any electric instruments, miking these instruments is also hard.” Since the members are not full-time musicians, assembling everyone for practise and performance is also a challenge but they hope to move forward with their vision. “We want to also create an album but that will take at least an year. Right now we want to focus on live performances and also reach international audiences as it is important for everyone to understand the richness of Tamil culture and literature,” Tharun signs off.