Kamalesh Maitra

Kamalesh Maitra (28 April 1928 – 22 April 2005), often referred to by the title Pandit, was an Indian classical musician, composer and teacher. He is recognised as the last master of the tabla tarang – a melodic percussion instrument consisting of numerous individually tuned hand drums, set in a semicircle. Maitra grew up in Calcutta and played the tabla until joining Uday Shankar's ballet company in 1950 and taking up the tabla tarang. He became the company's musical director and toured internationally with the troupe through to the mid-1970s.

Along with Alla Rakha, Shivkumar Sharma, Hariprasad Chaurasia and others, Maitra was among the musicians that Ravi Shankar selected for his Music Festival from India revue in 1974. He then accompanied Shankar on ex-Beatle George Harrison's North American tour that year – a venture that led to him performing with American jazz musicians Emil Richards and Tom Scott. Maitra settled in Berlin in 1977, where he performed and worked as a music teacher. In 1980, he formed the Ragatala Ensemble, an orchestra that fused elements of Indian and European classical music with jazz and other Western genres. Among his recordings, Tabla Tarang – Melody on Drums (1996) has received critical acclaim, one reviewer describing it as a "milestone" in world music. and the family lacked the musical lineage commonly associated with Hindustani classical music.

Maitra spent his formative years in Calcutta, he began playing a variety of hand drums, including tabla. an instrument made up of between ten and sixteen tablas, specifically the treble-variety dayan. With each hand drum tuned to a different pitch, producing a range of roughly one and a half octaves, Maitra was able to provide a combined melodic–rhythmic role in performances of ragas or ballet and dance compositions.

While developing the potential of the tabla tarang, he continued his advanced musical studies, During a period of over twenty years, he toured the United States, China, Africa and Europe with the company. sponsored by former Beatle George Harrison, a champion of Indian classical music in the West. Maitra's fellow performers included internationally acclaimed musicians such as Alla Rakha, Lakshmi Shankar, Shivkumar Sharma, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Sultan Khan and L. Subramaniam. Maitra recorded a studio album in England with the Music Festival orchestra – released in 1976 on Dark Horse Records – contributing on tabla tarang, sarod and ektara, before they all undertook a short European tour.

Maitra then joined the Music Festival personnel for Harrison's North American tour in November–December 1974, performing in the more jazz-inflected style of Shankar's Shankar Family & Friends crossover album. In keeping with Shankar's efforts to elevate the status of Indian percussionists, Maitra combined with Rakha (on tabla), T.V. Gopalkrishnan (mridangam) and Rijram Desad (pakavaj) in extended, four-way drum soloing – the highlight of their set, and a source of fascination for Harrison's rock drummers Jim Keltner and Andy Newmark. For the finale to the Indian portion of each concert, Maitra and the rest of Shankar's ensemble played with Harrison's entire band, which also included jazz percussionist Emil Richards and saxophonist Tom Scott.

Long interested in the possibilities of Indo–European musical fusion, In 2003, Germany's House of World Cultures (HKW) website wrote of Maitra's music with the Ragatala Ensemble: "The group has enabled him to fulfil his old dream of having his compositions played by a mixed European–Indian orchestra. The pieces follow the rules of classical Indian music but are deliberately fused with elements of European classical music, jazz and new music." In his 1997 autobiography, Raga Mala, Shankar describes Maitra as an "extremely versatile" musician, and Israeli clarinetist Giora Feidman. The following year, the Gramophone Company of India issued The Voice of Sarod from the Strokes of Drums – Tabla Tarang by Kamalesh Maitra, on which he played three ragas accompanied by Rakha's son Fazal Qureshi on tabla and Laura Patchen on tambura.

This was followed in 1996 by Tabla Tarang – Melody on Drums, issued in America by Smithsonian Folkways. in November 1993, contains a performance of "Raga Charukeshi" on which music critic Ken Hunt praises Maitra's playing as "phenomenal".

Final years and legacy In September 2000, Maitra was awarded the "Musicale Vitale" prize at Berlin's Werkstatt der Kulturen festival. He continued to perform and record with the Ragatala Ensemble until 2003, the same year that he premiered his final orchestral work, Raag Symphonia, in Berlin.

Maitra died on 22 April 2005, aged 76, in Kreischa, near the German city of Dresden. Hunt describes him as a "master musician" and attributes much of his musical vision to the pioneering spirit of Uday Shankar, who "painted the backdrops against which many trained musicians learned to deliver traditional music in a new age for people with no grounding or appreciation of traditional styles of dance or music". Maitra is commonly referred to as the "last master" of the comparatively rare tabla tarang.