É nādamuló - Nāta Rāga Varnam - Track 1 of 10 - Dr. M Balamuralikrishna - MMA 1976

I would like to express my special thanks of gratitude to the following for their contribution in the restoration project of this concert. 1. Smt. Kamini Dandapani, who was actually present in the concert on that evening of 27th December 1976, reminiscences through a stimulative and absorbing narrative of the concert. 2. Sri. Ravi Joshi, who has tirelessly worked with a ‘never give up attitude’ to find, locate and source the spool tapes of the concert and for investing his time and effort in digitising the spools to get an excellent audio quality. 3. Sri. Palghat Ramaswamy, an avid music collector, who was generous enough to kindly donate the spools for our posterity project of Murali-gānam. 4. Sri. Scott Dorsey, a German reel to reel technician at San Jose, California who was able to fix some technical issues with the player and calibration of speed. Reliving the amazing concert of MMA 1976 – Smt. Kamini Dandapani The memories of a “first time” experience are among our most precious. We store them away, gilded and revered, deep in our memory vault. They fade with time, acquire a rose-tinted haze, but they never, ever, go away. We think about them now and then as they recede further into those cobwebbed recesses, but rarely in any depth, or with any objectivity. But what happens when you get an opportunity to conjure up and relive the past, when a first experience is presented to you in its entirety to bring back to life a cherished memory ? It is both an amazing blessing and something that evokes a sense of disquiet and apprehension: what if that carefully enshrined memory turns out to be merely ordinary, or worse yet, a disappointment? This was my conundrum when I was invited to write about this concert, Sri Balamurali Krishna’s brilliant performance at the Madras Music Academy in December 1976. That was the very first time I heard him live. The auditorium was packed, I remember, and I was seated somewhere at the back. I really didn’t know what to expect. I was prepared for a nice, pleasant evening, if I was lucky. I was a teenager, at an age when everything is experienced at heightened intensity. That concert shook my very core and made me reevaluate everything I had been told about Carnatic music. I had never heard anything like that music before, and from that moment on, nobody else’s music came even close to evoking the emotions, awe and joy that Balamurali’s music did. That concert opened many doors to many worlds. Most precious of all, it jump-started a series of events and encounters that led to the unlikeliest of relationships between Balamurali and me : a lopsided friendship between a superstar musician, and a starry-eyed teenager. He played a huge role in my teenage and young adult years - not just musically, but in opening my mind to a way of thinking and living. To never do something just because it has always been done that way. To question assumptions, to push boundaries, to see and seek beauty and truth in fresh and unusu