Dream-kit makers drum up a storm

A bylane off Sitaram Ghosh Street would generally be considered a bookworm’s haunt. A typical north Calcutta neighbourhood close to the College Street book hub, the para exudes old-world, with its narrow alleys, buildings conjoined like Siamese twins and a million different publishing and printing factories. Not exactly a rock’n’roll environment.

The milieu, however, doesn’t deter Gautam Das, 43, from building one drumkit after another, tirelessly working in his tiny 12ftx10ft factory-workshop at the end of a blind lane, with just three assistants.

He’s been at it for the past 15 years. In all this while, the “expansion” has meant moving the “store” to a similar-sized room atop the main workshop. And, in a little over a decade, Gautam Drums, as his brand of instruments is better known, has become one of the first-call choices for budding drummers in the city, without burning a deep hole in the pocket.

Das’s store is not the only address in town for the drumming greenhorn looking for that budget kit. Over the past four decades, two shops in yet another bustling central city district, a stone’s throw from Lalbazar, have been the hub of locally manufactured drums.

Bapy Music, on Sunayat Sen Street across Rabindra Sarani, started it in 1971, building the first locally made drumkit. BCM Music Palace followed in a few years, specialising in fibreglass sets that became a rage in the mid-’80s and early ’90s.

In the US, independent drum-makers like this trio would be respected artisan-entrepreneurs, with adequate government support to help their businesses flourish. Custom drum-builders like Pork Pie Percussion, Dunette & Lang and Jeff Ocheltree are known the world over. All of them started in backyard garages.

The picture isn’t that rosy in this city, but our local heroes shine on. The reasons are simple: you can get stuff custom-made, not to mention the price. A decent imported drumkit comes for Rs 20,000, but the hardware may be rickety. And then there’s always the issue of after-sales services, accessories and repair.

In contrast, kits from our local drum-makers range from as little as Rs 2,500 to over Rs 15,000 for a full-blown, six or seven-piece set.

Mahadev Chakraborty, the owner of Bapy Music, started off with a gramophone retail and repair shop at the Sunyat Sen Street address in the late ’50s. “I was always interested in how drums are made. A Goanese drummer named Victor who often visited my gramophone store taught me what drumset design is all about,” says Chakraborty.

Das’s knowhow didn’t come from a very different source: he assisted a music instrument maker and was a master at operating the lathe machine. Once he knew the way drum hardware was built, switching to making drums was smooth. Setting up his own store was the next, natural step.

Bapy Music started rolling out the first locally-made drums in 1971: the first ones to be manufactured in Calcutta. Everything except the hardware — which Chakraborty imported — was built at his Lalbazar address.

Bapy Music’s drums caught on immediately, so much so that by the late ’70s, Chakraborty started sending out kits to Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai. By the mid-80s, he expanded his workshop. “I started off with two assistants. Today, there are over 30 workers in our company,” smiles a proud Chakraborty.

BCM Music Palace on Rabindra Sarani was founded in the 50s by Bhimchandra Mondal — thus the name BCM. Grandson Tapas now mans the Lalbazar store, while his father Ashoke, 55, visits the store’s Howrah factory every working day.

BCM started manufacturing its sets from the early ’80s. “We had been in the music instruments business for over two decades before we started manufacturing our drums. We did enough research to find out what sort of materials we would need in order to make quality drumkits,” says Ashoke. In the turn of the decade, the company’s fibreglass shell model became an instant hit with city drummers.

Then Chiradeep Lahiri, former drummer for Krosswindz, Span and Bickram Ghosh’s fusion outfit Rhythmscape started off playing the drums in the mid-’80s.

“The very first kit I owned was a second-hand BCM make, which lasted me a long time. Gautam’s drums came in the early ’90s, and they were very decent kits,” recalls Lahiri.

Monojit ‘Kochu’ Datta of the Orient Express recalls playing BCM and Bapy Music drums “for almost a decade” before actually laying his hands on an imported drumkit. Even then, Datta still gets most of his stuff custom-made from Das’s store.

Ditto for Ritoban Das, drummer for Cassini’s Division and Debapratim Bakshi, drummer with Span and the Saturday Night Blues Band. Hip Pocket drummer and t2 columnist Nondon Bagchi — who owns a vintage Ludwig drumset that dates back to the ’70s — relies on Das’s shop for hardware-related problems and his drum cases.

ARKA DAS

Published in The Telegraph Metro, Saturday , April 24 , 2010

Musical nook where records rule

The Free School Street neighbourhood is a nostalgic nook of the city where firaangs still touch down to get a feel of what was once a bustling hub of hippie culture.

Just before the corner where the road takes a turn into the upmarket bustle of Lindsay Street, a series of quaint gramophone record-players lure passers-by.

Often, when the MTV-friendly trash on the CD systems run their daily course, the 76s circle out interesting tunes: jazz and blues standards, screechy Motown, the odd Elvis, sometimes Marley, Dylan or The Meters. Anyone who has ever had a record player knows the sound of a well-oiled one, and these shops maintained theirs well enough.

A stone’s throw from the intersection of Sudder Street and Free School Street, rechristened Mirza Ghalib Street, stands Record Prince, better known as Chacha’s shop.

Chacha —Anis Ashraf, 65 – hardly visits the store these days; it is manned by his two sons, Danish and Abid. This is the Mecca of vinyl records in town, not to mention a few well-maintained gramophone players, some of which are even up for sale.

The racks on display on the pavement with cassette tapes — yes, some of these still exist — and CDs of the latest Bollywood remixes are a facade that throws off all but the genuine vinyl aficionado.

The real gems are kept in a room, rather a musty hole in the wall, behind the shop. Stacked up in racks, the records are alphabetically arranged according to the artistes’ names. Each one goes right back to its place after a record-to-tape, or now record-to-CD, capture.

While he had sold off a large part of his collection a decade back, there are still over 5,000 records at Ashraf’s store. His collection is a Flower-Power music lover’s haven, a jazz aficionado’s well-kept secret and a roomful of rarities for the classical music devotee.

In the tiny backroom, Santana’s eponymous debut album from 1969, a bunch of albums by the Southern Rock legends Allman Brothers Band and Charlie Daniels Band, records from the Seventies by British progressive rock pioneers King Crimson and jam band pioneers like the Grateful Dead share shelves with jazz must-haves like Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, live albums by the Bill Evans Trio and Weather Report classics.

Then there are records of everyone from Pandit Ravi Shankar to Debussy, Rabindrasangeet renditions by Hemanta Mukhopadhyay, not to mention a nostalgic 80s throwback with everyone from Jackson to Kraftwerk on offer.

Ashraf “inherited” the gems from their previous owner, Bakhtiar Jaan. As an employee of the nameless record store that Bakhtiar ran, Ashraf came to learn not just the technical details of how a 78rpm is supposed to run smooth but also about genres and artistes that were worlds apart from his upbringing.

Setting up Record Prince in 1965, he still keeps up with practices that he learned on the job. To this day, he maintains worn-out diaries that detail track names and artistes on a particular LP, year of publication and total length of the recording. Details like these were prized titbits that customers would lap up while getting “transfers” done, mostly to cassette tapes.

The music is one thing. Then there’s the artwork on these vinyls: imagine the excitement of laying your hands on original LPs from The Beatles’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, with its sleeve after sleeve of sheer psychedelia, the paranoid face that reflects King Crimson’s alien soundscapes on In The Court Of The Crimson King or Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, designed by British graphic designer/photographer Storm Thorgerson.

“While a number of vinyl records from my collection are broken, there are a few that are over five or six decades old. The charm of the vinyl is that even with years of repeated playing, these do not lose their warm, rich sound. The same cannot be said about cassettes or even CDs,” Ashraf smiles.

And while he’s officially “retired” from the business, the magic of the vinyl hasn’t quite left him.

“I’ve handed over most of the duties to my sons now, but I still keep track of a rare LP being sold from Record Prince’s collection,” says Ashraf.

ARKA DAS

Published in The Telegraph Metro on May 19, 2010

Parallel universe of figure & form

Three young minds, three radical expressions, three visions, as it were. The Other Vision, the ongoing show at Studio 21, offers viewers a parallel universe of figure, form and lineation, a glimpse of the creative impulses of those at the up-and-coming fringe of the city’s art spectrum.

Sambaran Das, Goutam Khamaru and Anup Mondal, all in their late 20s, collectively conjure up images of urban disconnect. While the artists may not know one another or may not be very familiar with the other’s work, their conjoined milieu shares themes of abandonment and despair, giving shape to “other” images, of not just what the eyes see, but what it perceives.

The Expressionist lines of Sambaran, primarily using a tonal palette heavy in shadowy, muted browns and black, offer a deconstructed torso of an Everyman, an office-goer, replete with his leather portmanteau, sighing up without a head in Hole; an insect eye sits atop a figure lying head down on a taktaposh, transformed perhaps during a siesta on a lazy Sunday afternoon in Metamorphosis. Elsewhere, Sambaran handles a chaotic passenger compartment in Main Line Dailies; his vision of the entire jamboree presented in a surreal light, bathed in warmer tones of ochre, occasionally emphasised. Everyone’s present: the fruit seller, the ubiquitous newspaper reader, the card players, a bored standing throng, the gutkha-seller. The panorama is disturbed, and metamorphoses occur here as well. Sambaran’s strength, however, lies in his inanimate studies, the charcoal drawing-like quality of dry brush acrylic-on-canvas offering infinite interpretations of loneliness as its essence.

Goutam works with his sense of humour in place. His six works, called Animal Series I to VI, are in mixed media, tempera and acrylic. In each, magical creatures animate frames, not as one particular being, but as expressions. A composite of eyes, body colour, legs, tails and horns, these are figurative abstracts, his creations familiar yet not easily recognisable. His is an ornate style that fixes the gaze with its vibrant tonal palette, primarily warm in nature. In Animal Series V, the fanged hunter that pounces upon its prey actually flaunts a peacock-like plumage on its physical shape, whereas the hunted is done in black-and-gold reticulates. Functional opposites collide to question the Natural world.

Anup, whose twin works are both in aluminium wire and wood, offers details only when required. Both expressions of suffering, Blake’s Lamb and Persistence of Becoming Numb, are agonised figurations that perhaps needed more company to fit into context. Typically without a cognitive face, his aluminium figures are distorted, disjointed shapes that seem to haunt dreams of despair.

The show is on at the Dover Terrace address till February 12.

As appeared in The Telegraph Metro, January 30, 2010