Watch Gurpreet Chana, Canada's leading fusion artiste, bring together the sounds of diverse cultures with a single instrument, the Hang
Pic courtesy/Nisha Sonde
"I would bang tables and pans as a kid, before my grandfather decided to replace them with a tabla," laughs Gurpreet Chana, while talking about his love for percussion and training under tabla exponent Parshotam Singh. Based in Canada, Chana often used to be the only Indian in his school and university. While that never affected his passion for Indian music, it gave him an unusual identity in a multicultural diaspora. 'The Tabla Guy' is how the world now knows the 30-year-old musician-engineer, courtesy the university summits where he represented his college with a pair of intriguing Indian 'drums'.
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From playing in gurudwara congregations to Christmas carols in school, Chana's art is inspired by diverse influences — and it's not just the tabla that fascinates him. This evening, he will perform with the Hang, an instrument that combines steel drum acoustics with the hollow bass of the South Indian Ghatam and African Udu drum, into a single unit. "In 2003, I was attending a world music festival in Quebec. A cellist took out this UFO-like instrument while jamming and said 'play'. The moment my hand struck it, I was blown away," he recalls. Unlike other instruments, the Hang provides both the elements of music — melody and rhythm. "I always wondered about the possibilities of such a combination. Luckily, I managed to get myself one." There are only 7,000 Hangs worldwide, each handcrafted to offer a particular tuning or scale. This evening, Chana will play with the Ake Bono scale.
This fascination for the convergence of melody and rhythm also led to his unique project, TABLIX in 2009. "Today, every instrument can be integrated digitally. I wondered why that had not been made possible with the tabla." After seven years of research, Chana has designed a digital software and hardware that allows interplay of tabla and electronic music. "I can practically plug the tabla into my laptop," says Chana, who used the same idea to collaborate with a violinist too. A few years ago, he also collaborated with international artistes like Nelly Furtado and Bally Sagoo. He recalls, "Nelly and I were jamming for a project once, and I was playing around with some tabla compositions. And that set her off to compose an entirely new track!"
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