Biography

Music and U. Shrinivas make a long and beautiful story. In 1975 his parents found him exploring a mandolin. As soon as he could listen to him, his father, a clarinet player named Satayanarayana Raju, began to teach his innate talent to his son. U Shrinivas is not yet six years old ! And so the boy, born in Palakol, a city located in the West side of the Andra Pradesh , began to perform his first scales. After the first rudiments that his father taught him, he began taking lessons from Subbaraju, a disciple of the most famous Chembai Vaidyanata Bhagavatar. This master sings the themes that the very young Shrinivas had to transcribe on his sensible ropes. Some light pieces of work to acquire the knack, before he could play classical music where his expert fingering will soon impose the mandolin, an unprecedented instrument for carnatic music that was, at that time dominated by violin or veena. At the age of nine, the young prodigy was already performing on stage, but when he performed in December 1982 for the first time at a recital at the Indian Fine Arts Society of Madras, people began to recognize this talent amongst the most precocious to the ears of the supercilious guardians of a tradition of many centuries.

25 years later, U Shrinivas has performed in numerous concerts, in India as well as many foreign countries, and in new ways, he is able to take up the classical thematic as to be prolific in a totally original catalogue. “When I started, I was considered as an heretic. I just had decided to go beyond the frontiers of our music, with a total respect of its fundamentals”, told us with a sweet authority, that young guy with thin circle glasses in 2002. Because of his virtuosity without problems, he will succeed in his double bet: he can convince his prestigious equals, and he also can connect to others brothers in arms located more in the West. This duality can also be felt when the musician endorses the pedagogue clothes: if he gives music lessons for more or less thirty disciples in the school he has founded in Madras, the Capital of Tamil Nadu where he lives, he always takes time and cares about pursuing his own apprenticeship from his music masters.

“Samjanitha”

release on march 25th, 2008
(Dreyfus Jazz / Sony)

He faces the future with determination, but he also has his foundations in the past, and such a state of mind presides once again in his new creation : “Samjanitha”. It’s such a journey to go and encounter some other people whose finality is to re-discover these talents within the depth of them. He and his double. Throughout one's travels, one encounters many musicians with whom U Shrinivas could play in the past : John Mac Laughlin, the eclectic guitar player, Zakir Hussain, the most gifted of the Tablas, T.H. Vikku Vinayakram, the most revered guatam player ( the clay pitcher),and Selvaganesh, his son who has become henceforth the reference for kanjeera, a small percussion that he know how to agitate with his agile fingers. In the company of those guys, the mandolin player became famous inside the Remember Shakti, the emblematical band born from an accomplished melting of jazz improvisations and classical music from India. An approach that pleases you to Shrinivas, and he adds with delicacy and delight, a touch slightly more “pop”, that has become one of the most important aspect of his style. For “Samjanitha”, he also asked the bass player Dominique Di Piazza to join him. He was so dedicated and committed to this project that he signs one theme, and he also asked guitar player Debashish Battacharya to sign on as well, whose detonating accents of his slide can produce psychedelic marvels, as well as the saxophonist George Brooks and someone who knows how to play all percussions Simavani… He doesn’t forget to ask his little brother to join, U Ranesh, and play the mandolin too, from which he gets some shimmering sonorities. All of them together make a self-portrait of U Shrinivas, a mandolin player with multiples faces, and this whole assembly looks like the music that is played.

What is this about? Of a suite of eleven themes where you can find the most some original compositions by U Shrinivas, to which are added two pieces that he took from the traditional catalogue, re-orchestrated for that special occasion… and two titles which are a complete summary of the state of mind of those sessions : ‘River Song’ composed by Nitin Sawhney, one of the figure-heads of the diaspora that was raised in England, and that cares more for more electronic music, and the ‘alap’ of the rigorous raga “Hamsadhwani”,, the most stretched and ethereal piece of this album. Much better, this alap, which means the introductive part of the rag, thanks to a wonderful reversal of the values, as he always has done throughout his career, is the conclusion of this album, and creates some dreamlike point of suspension. Connoisseurs will certainly appreciate this. This thematical diversity allows one to go beyond the norm and to diversify the pleasures, from light instances to some graver moments, and the climates, from a sharper dance to a dense calmness , all guided by the aesthetic eclecticism of the owner of the place. Far from losing his way all along this happy post-modern labyrinth, U Shrinivas succeeds in braiding one entity, holding fast to his factory label : the envy of transgressing well established codes, not in order to trample those, but for the purpose of magnifying them, to create his own version, and beyond, his vision of a world where exchange is a very important value. ‘This recording celebrates this special place that is called a cross road. A place where people and ideas can intersect. A place where stories are told and where adventures to the unedited are created. A place to talk, to create and dance, but also and mostly to listen. “ By the way, listening, it’s your turn!