Samir Chatterjee, Steve Gorn

Parampara! In Memory of Gour Goswami is a concert of Hindustani music on the bansuri, the bamboo flute, played by the Western-born flautist Steve Gorn and dedicated to his teacher. The label presents it as proof that a musician born in the West can enter another tradition in depth and reach a maturity accepted as authentic in both cultures. The programme is classical in shape: a long morning raga, a shorter one and a light-classical thumri.

Steve Gorn studied the bansuri in Calcutta in the early 1970s with Sri Gour Goswami, who died in 1975. The album is a remembrance of him: according to the notes, his playing recalled an older India in which each raga evoked its own landscape. Gorn is joined by Samir Chatterjee on tabla and Annalisa Adami on tanpura. The session took place on 24 March 1996 at the studios of Sender Freies Berlin, produced by Peter Pannke, with Dieter Hauer in charge of production and editing and Wolfgang Hoff as balance engineer. Pannke and Gorn wrote the booklet texts.

Rag Lalit takes up almost fifty minutes. The vilambit, the slow section, runs for 36 minutes: the melody unfolds over the tabla's slow cycle and the drone of the tanpura, with the time needed to establish each note of the raga. The drut that follows, twelve minutes long, raises the tempo and brings the drummer forward. Rag Basant Mukhari, under nine minutes, is a more compact exposition. The closing Jogia Thumri turns to the lighter, song-based genre of the thumri.

The title and the dedication make the album a statement about lineage: a student recording, two decades after his teacher's death, the ragas he learned from him, with Indian accompanists and a full classical structure. Gorn himself wrote part of the booklet, with Pannke.

A CD of 67 minutes in Wergo's Music of World Cultures series with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, catalogue SM 1528 2, released in 1998, with a 20-page booklet.