Sitarist Gives Chants a Chance

The sound is ethereal--the hypnotically compelling repetitions of Gregorian chant, meditative and calming. Then, unexpectedly, another sound enters, the plangent call of a sitar, its sensual sound twining around the voices of the singers, blending into a unique musical experience.

No wonder it’s called “Meeting of Angels.”

And, tonight at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, music fans will have an opportunity to hear the unusual combination of sitarist Ustad Nishat Khan and French vocal group Ensemble Gilles Benchois in concert.

The performance is one of four in the first U.S. tour of Meeting of Angels, a musical partnership that has garnered rave reviews in Europe.

“Thousands of people,” wrote Spain’s La Republica, “crowded the Basilica Ara Ceoli and a hushed silence followed the concert of the famous French Gregorian choir at the side of Ustad Nishat Khan, master of the sitar.”

The Gilles Benchois singers, all of whom hold diplomas from the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique de Lyon, are specialists in ancient music, and the music of the Middle Ages in particular.

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Ustad Nishat Khan comes from one of the most distinguished families in Indian classical music. His father, Ustad Imrat Khan, and his uncle, Ustad Vilayat Khan, are legendary players. His great-great-grandfather, Sahibdad Khan, developed the large, dramatic-sounding bass sitar called the subrahar.

Ustad Nishat Khan, in fact, represents the eighth consecutive generation of sitarists in a family that traces its musical lineage to the 16th century.

Khan has performed in many crossover settings--with symphony orchestras, with composer Philip Glass and with jazz guitarist John McLaughlin. Still, the idea of integrating Indian classical music and Gregorian chant surfaced only recently.

“A couple of years ago,” says Khan, “I heard a recording of Gregorian chant, and when I heard it I had goose pimples--an amazing emotional reaction. And I thought it would be so beautiful to weave something into that. Because it does sound very much like Indian music with the way it is set and with the movements of the chants.”

Despite Khan’s visceral affinity to Gregorian chant, there are obvious technical differences between it and Indian classical music. Still, he believed that, they were similar in one primal sense.

“Both musics have a sacred foundation,” he said, “and I knew it was vital to keep that foundation secure. I knew it would be necessary to keep the originality of the text and the original movement of the chant, and combine them with Indian music. So I just sort of work around the Gregorian chant melodies. Sometimes I arrange the melodies to fit with what I’m doing, but the texts are the same, and even the contexts of the melodies are the same.”

Khan was not nearly so clear about how to approach the blending of the two types of music when the project first came to fruition via a recording--under the title “Meeting of Angels”--for Amiata Records.

“It was a challenge,” he said, “in that there truly were cultures coming together, with many ideas flowing by. I thought, Should I do this part harmoniously, in a way that I could do other things with it? Should I use a bit of electronic music here? Should I do something else there?

“Then, a few days before the recording, after I had set my mind to do some sort of arrangements, I realized the best concept was simply to do a very clean, organic record--traditional, beautiful, organic, clean. Something that retained the essential elements of both musics, and that would also be a piece of music that one could pick up and feel good about.”

The recording has that clarity, especially when Khan takes the view that less can be more, placing his notes with meticulous attention to their association with the chants.

“One of the pieces,” he said, “the ‘Reminiscere Miserationum,’ I like to call, in my own mind, ‘Raindrops in a Cathedral.’ Because I just spring one note here, one note there, like raindrops, while the voices are singing.”

Khan--as have other Indian classical musicians before him, perhaps most notably Ravi Shankar--has not hesitated to reach out to other forms of music.

Yet he is firm in his belief that combinations such as “Meeting of Angels” can be done only when the artistic disciplines of each genre are respected.

“You can’t just say, ‘OK, I’m going to play with this great violinist, or with the wonderful guitarist or with these fine singers.’ And then what you play is just what kids play. You can’t do that. Collaboration has to be in the real musical sense. It has to have a sense of coming together in spirit, in mind and in body. It has to gel, to have convergence.”

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He is critical of the mix-and-match multicultural musical combinations that are proliferating.

“You hear so many collaborations nowadays in the name of ‘world music,’ and all they’re doing is just playing sounds,” Khan said.

“I like to feel that a true musical partnership--of the sort that we’ve done with ‘Meeting of Angels’--takes the values of the individual musics and honors the imaginative ideas of the players, so that they become one, together.”

* “Meeting of Angels,” with Ustad Nishat Khan and Ensemble Gilles Benchois, will be presented Friday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. 8 p.m. $24-$28. Presented by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County. (949) 854-4646.