Remembering Harishankar

If Michael Jackson is the King of Pop, then Harishankar ji is the King of Ganjira.
No one can play Ganjira like Hari. He had magical fingers.

There are couple of You tube videos one must watch to know this Ganjira genius.
Though he received couple of awards, I think the music fratenity must honur him with a posthumous award.

Today we have couple of famous Ganjira artistes like Ganesh Kumar and Vikus son, Hari will remain in the hearts of music world for ever.

Harishankar was a Genius and was a nightmare for many topline percussionist. He will play short and sweet and outperform the mridangam artist. I completely agree his heights cannot be reached by any Ganjira player. I have heard this story and i'm sharing it here


Harishankar asked this question to Rajamani (First son of Palghat Mani Iyer.)


"We all know that there are totally 35 talams. Imagining that 35 people are sitting and start at the same count and start putting each thalam in their hands....so we have 35 talams running simultaneously...At that point..the percussionist should play a Korvai, which would begin when all 35 of them begin and the Korvai should end when all the 35 talams come to samam at the same time...as in...if one thalam is 8 beats and the other is 3 beats...both will end at the same time after their LCM which is 24 beats. Similairly it should be done for 35 talams..."

Rajamani who is a wizard in Maths...painfully did the calculation..and to his shock...he found out that the least common multiple for the count of the 35 thalams would be such a huge figure that..if u imagine one beat is going to be one second, the it would take 115 years for all the 35 thalams to come back to samam for the second time...

So he went back to Hari and said its not possible..but Hari said.."if you accept you haven't found the answer tell me and I shall give you the answer..its simple"...But Rajamani never lets things go..So he bought more time and started recalculating but could never find an answer. Unfortunately before giving the answer Hari died

He was not entitled with many awards except sangeeth natak academy Award. There must be a separate award like Sangeetha choodamani or Sangeetha Kalanidhi for those who were not recognised or awarded when they were alive.

Rishi

Ganjira was added to the carnatic music concerts in 1930's. But the legendary Harishankar was the one who gave a status to that intrument and mad the carnatic world to accept that even upapakkavadhyam can play a major role in a concert's success. He was born to play Ganjira. His fingering , Speed , Variation , Laya was truly brilliant. When harishanar starts his turn during a Thani there wil be a long silence followed by a thunderous sollu , which will make the audience horipilating. Another Speciality of harishankar was his playing of mridangam bani apart from Ganjira bani.

Once in a concert , RTP in bhairavi set to rupakam " Govindanadi Mukundanadi Enakavar sondhamadi ". This was not sung in the usual way as KVN does , pallavi structure was altered a bit complicatively. First half of the pallavi (Purvangam) will start one count before samam and the Next half (Uthrangam) will start three counts after samam. The Mridangist was not able to pick up the pallavi , harishankar understood the moment this was sung and played literally mridangam in kanjira .

Unfortunately he died at a very young age , after his demise ghanjira lost his shine. There are few people playing ghanjira now and doing fairly a good job. But there can be only one harishankar , nobody can even try what he has done and achieved in Ganjira.

I invite all his fans to paricipate in this discussion and share their views about this legendry Musician.