A well-connected young tabla player named Suphala Patankar plies the waters of New York society:
The setting was the Greenwich Village town house of Diane Von Furstenberg, where, at the behest of the author Salman Rushdie, a fan, Suphala had been invited to play the tabla with her band at a party honoring the writers’ organization PEN. The crowd of around 200 quieted briefly as Padma Lakshmi, Mr. Rushdie’s wife, introduced Suphala as a new talent worthy of their ears…The writer Suketu Mehta, long a friend of Suphala’s, said that for a young Indian woman with musical aspirations the tabla was an odd choice. “It’s the equivalent of finding a female drummer in a rock ‘n’ roll band,” he said. “It’s not unheard of, but it’s unusual…”
She’s got a Forrest Gump-like ability to connect with the famous:
Last year at a party at Bungalow 8, Suphala met Mr. Rushdie, Ms. Lakshmi, Mr. [Sean] Lennon and Harper Simon, the son of Paul Simon. Within days she was jamming in the studio with Mr. Lennon, the younger Mr. Simon and Edie Brickell, the singer, who is married to Paul Simon. Mr. Rushdie offered to help promote her music…After hearing Norah Jones, the daughter of Ravi Shankar, sing at the Knitting Factory in 2002, Suphala introduced herself and asked the singer if she wouldn’t mind stopping by her apartment to record some vocal tracks. Ms. Jones obliged, not long before her first album orbited her into international stardom…
Suphala’s got a traditional side…
Alla Rakha was known to take poor tabla playing as an offense. “It was nerve-racking to play in front of him anytime, but the first time especially,” Suphala said. “Afterward he said, ‘From now on you can study with me and Zakir, but no one else…’ “
And a fusion side:
One song, “The Lover,” contains a mix of the voices of Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith reading a Deepak Chopra translation of a poem by Rabindranath Tagore…Perry Farrell, the singer for Jane’s Addiction and at the time the frontman of the band Porno for Pyros, stopped in to see her perform at a club. After the show Mr. Farrell invited Suphala to join his troupe, which then included a contortionist and two women who did a fire-breathing routine on stilts during concerts… “I was the most sober person on the tour.”
She’s had some inattentive audiences in America, but she’s big in Afghanistan:
Word that a student of Allarakha and Zakir Hussein was in the country made the national television news, and the concert hall was packed by locals and master musicians. Few of them, if any, had ever seen a woman play tabla. “They really seemed to be celebrating,” Suphala said. “They said no musician had come for 20 years, so it was a big deal to them that someone came and just that they were recognized.”
As for Suphala’s music, she’s a crisp, rapid and skilled tabla player. But to my ears, some of her tracks submerge the beauty of the instrument to new age-y synth. Listen here.
