Interview with Karsh Kale

Walking into the hotel lobby at a few minutes after 1pm, I find NYC tabla nawaaz and producer Karsh Kale already there, lounging on some black leather sofas after their gig at the Bambu. This is a very confusing situation for an interviewer like myself; I can’t remember ever having to interview an artist who was actually showed up on time. I proceed with caution, keeping my fingers crossed for fear that he or I will have too little to say, that the interview will stall and we’ll wind up staring blankly at each other.

I’ve just said that Karsh Kale was awaiting me in the hotel lobby, but given the way my attention wandered during the course of the meeting, it might be more accurate to say, as Karsh’s buddy quipped at the end, that it was more of an “Exclusive Interview with Vishal Vaid (and sidekick K. Kale).” Vishal, whose voice punctuates the title track of Karsh’s latest album Liberation, is something of a rare find for me, as someone who loves and understands Urdu and Punjabi poetry in more than an amateurish sense. In addition to providing vocals for the electronically-oriented Realize band of which Karsh Kale is the driving force, Vishal also does more traditional ghazal mehfils, with Karsh accompanying him on the tabla, and he’s acquainted with the work of great Urdu and Punjabi poets such as Bullhe Shah, Ghalib, Qateel Shifai, and their ilk. More than this, he seems to have his finger on the pulse of the newer Urdu poetry developing in the wake of the very political poetic period that seems to have died down a bit with the passing away or decreasing activity of the great Socialist poets such as Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Sahir Ludhianwi, and Habib Jalib. Vishal also writes ghazals himself, though I didn’t have the presence of mine to ask whether the short bait that he iterates in “Liberation” is his own:

dawâ milî na masîhâ milâ
kashtî ko na kinâra milâ

We found no medicine and no messiah,
Our boat found no shore.

After a brief digression with Vishal I start in with Karsh, who is lean and laid-back today, his black, curling hair in full bloom, his eyes dark and friendly Vishal’s hair is more orderly and well-oiled, parted neatly down the middle, and his eyes are a languid hazel that might seem cynical if he weren’t so upbeat talking about ghazals, tradition, and innovation. The obligatory question about family, aimed at drawing out a personal history that we might then discuss in more detail, fails miserably for the first time in my experience. Usually it gets a lot of mileage; people seem to love to talk about the evolution of their craft, the little details of their lives, as long as it’s for a noble cause, such as the satisfaction of an inquisitive interviewer. Neither Karsh nor Vishal volunteer much in the way of autobiography.

But at some point, I pose a question about dissemination of meaning and the way in which a song evolves and lives through performance. What I mean is this: certain writers, for instance, can be very jealous about their prose or poetry in the sense that they might not want their readers to take away a meaning that might be contrary to the one that they had intended. I know because I’ve been one of those writers. When someone says to us, “I think your poem was about this,” we want to lash out and say, “No, that’s not what this is about at all, this is what I intended it to mean.” For that reason, disseminating writing and giving it up to others so that they can find their own meanings in it can be a kind of painful exile.

Once you write something, it’s no longer yours alone, if it ever was in the first place. Music might work in a similar way, but Karsh and Vishal don’t see any need to be troubled about this. As Vishal objects, what is the point of making music if people don’t take away a personal meaning from it? And this is true even if the audience’s meaning contradicts the meaning that the musician might have “intended.” This tolerance for a diversity of meanings is one of the things that makes Karsh’s music so interesting. Let me put it in a different way:

It often seems that there’s a struggle going on between two models of “postmodernity” (whatever that word is supposed to mean). The model that is most often brought forward (or attacked) is the version according to which there is ultimately no “true” or authentic meaning, no truth -- in the end, everything is meaningless. Not a notion that’s likely to send many into transports of joy. When the so-called Asian Underground scene began to work its way into mainstream consciousness after the release of Talvin Singh’s Anokha, there was a certain amount of theorising going on about why this sort of “ethno-techno” was coming out. Why was electronic music beginning to incorporate such seemingly antithetical organic things like tablas, Hindi vocals, chants and nose-flutes? To some extent standard electronica was becoming too apathetic, too many cold servings of chilled, disinterestedly shaking beats going around. Therefore the sudden appearance of non-electronic sounds from non-Western cultures was the beginning not only of a spicing up of the frozen electronic plate, but also of a kind of spiritualisation that might lead to a new sacred music, full of meanings rather than devoid of meaning.

To listen to a record like Liberation is to understand this other mode of “postmodernity,” if we’re going to insist on retaining this word. As Karsh told me, one clubgoer might listen to a piece being performed by the Realize Band and be thrilled to recognise Raag Bhairav, while another might hear the same piece and understand the “four on floor.” The music has that ability to mean very different things to different people without collapsing into a depressing kind of central meaninglessness, which is why it can appeal to such a diverse crowd -- of Desis and their friends alike. Karsh feels that perhaps the Desi scene has been too inbred in some sense. He tells me how he once he once tried to take two non-Desi friends into a club catering to South Asians, and they weren’t allowed in. At this juncture he felt that he wanted to do music that was not merely “Desi-centric,” but open to all kinds of people, which is certainly what it’s turned out to be.

Furthermore, Karsh talks about the role of this kind of music in producing a new “American reality” in the face of the unfortunate undercurrent of xenophobia that followed the terrorist attacks in New York. I balk a bit at the notion of music producing any sort of national identity in any programmatic sense, but as he goes on I see what he means. I think that what Karsh’s music would produce, at any rate, is a many-voiced “American identity” that, like one of Karsh’s musical pieces, would mean many things to many Americans. And this is exactly what the new America, so promising in its diversity, really needs.