A Stern Awakening
We're goofing around in San Francisco for a few weeks, staying across 19th Avenue from Sigmund Stern Grove, home since 1938 to the Stern Grove Festival, the country's oldest free outdoor music series. The place smells great. Mornings, I've been running among the towering eucalypti and evergreens that surround the grove, which resembles a lush elongated bowl set surprisingly deep into surrounding neighborhoods lined with stucco houses. The grove's natural amphitheatrical landscape provides generous acoustics for the ten thousand or more picnickers, many perched high up the grove's slopes, who turn the place into a gigantic party most summer Sunday afternoons.
Breathing Under Water, a collaboration of sitar player Anoushka Shankar and laptop-computer jockey Karsh Kale, performed yesterday afternoon following the Non-Stop Bhangra Collective, a multiethnic group of local DJs, dancers, rapper, and live drummers who reignite the music of India's Punjab region. Dancers danced, picnickers picnicked, listeners listened, and gabbers gabbed as Shankar, Kale, and their group played a type of Indi-electronic-rock fusion that leaned heavily on the Hindustani (or Northern Indian) classical music semi-popularized by Anoushka's father, Ravi Shankar, who provided the melodic inspiration for at least one tune, which was dedicated to the Hindu deity Shiva. Shankar and Kale's group also included a flutist, a singer, and a morsing (South Indian jaw harp) player. As Indian classical music, it was lighter than light; as picnic music for a warm, slightly foggy afternoon in a verdant natural womb, it sure beat a pops concert.