“Nathulal ji,” I shout as I spot Nathulal Solanki darting toward the makeshift green room behind the stage. “I’m a huge fan,” I say. He’s wearing a blue silk kurta; it’s dark and his splendid salt-and-pepper moustache is shimmering under the evening moonlight. We’re inside Mehrangarh fort, in Jodhpur, for the ninth edition of the annual folk/fusion festival called Jodhpur RIFF (Rajasthan International Folk Festival, held on October 13-17 this year).

The courtyard we’re in is a short walk from the main stage hosting the evening performances. The bar is a few metres away, so it’s naturally louder here than it is on stage.

Solanki is supposed to perform soon, but he’s kind enough to talk to me briefly, refusing my offer to go to a quieter, enclosed area for a sit-down interview, insisting that it’s more fun, more natural this way — in a corner, just chit-chatting. Solanki is a celebrated player of the nagara, a two-drum folk instrument of Rajasthan — of Arabic origin, he tells me — that’s played with a pair of sticks. It’s loud, and was mostly used in temples or during times of war, he says, but slowly began making its way into festive occasions or birthdays and weddings. Now, it’s everywhere. Solanki is a seasoned and highly respected performer among non-mainstream audiences and musicians, but he’s also made his way into the mainstream in recent years, having performed sessions of Coke Studio, the breakout TV show by MTV.

Music in the folk tradition is most often passed down over generations orally. There’s a strong emphasis on preserving the historical context, and continuing the idea of legacy. Solanki has been trained by past masters of the instrument, and he, in turn, teaches younger students (including his sons) to pass on his years of wisdom and mastery of the nagara. The greater attention showered on the instrument and, in turn, its proponents, is something he attributes to the ever-evolving nature of ‘fusion’ music. “ Yeh saala fusion ne confusion daal diya hai . (Fusion has led to confusion.) The sound of the nagara changes, and it gets more publicity. Whenever something is considered badmaash , naughty, it’ll get more publicity. People will gravitate toward it, to see how it’s naughty.” This idea of fusion, of different worlds colliding, though, remains fluid and elusive as ever.

It’s 9.35pm; Solanki will be onstage at 10 for a collaboration with well-known Australian percussionist Ben Walsh, with a host of Rajasthani percussionists joining them. There is going to be a khartal on stage; a bunch of instruments — including just a regular drum kit — that Walsh will play; a huge dhol that takes two people to manoeuvre; two sets of nagaras, which Solanki and his son will play; and the bhapang, a thrilling, weird, almost cartoonish sounding instrument from Rajasthan.

Solanki has put on his pagdi . He’s sitting cross-legged on stage, a picture of perfect concentration as his hands whir, sparkle, and twinkle on the two drums. He’s at one with his instrument. Walsh is flitting around on stage, juggling between a bunch of instruments, like a kid in a candy store. He’s playing a square pad-like instrument that I, and most people in the nearly 1,500-strong crowd, have never seen before. Fifteen other musicians are on stage too, all of them assisting the rhythm in one way or the other. We all know drummers are best known for making a racket, so things are getting progressively louder with each passing bar. They’re following an arrangement that appears, to these untrained ears, to fall into a lilting 7/8 time signature.

Chunks of the performance are improvised in real time, played off of the performers’ state of mind and energy levels, and those of the audience. There’s no conventional melody directing the music. Another factor that people tend to overlook is that the drums, the percussions, often form the framework of the music. They add the spine. Conventionally, your ears will forgive a bum note on the sitar, a missed chord on the guitar, accidental dissonance caused by hitting the black key on a piano instead of a white one. But even the slightest misstep in the rhythm, and it’s like a hair in your soup, a crying baby on a flight, a mosquito buzzing near the ear just as you’re about to fall asleep. It’s metal dragged across a slippery concrete floor.

So there’s very little room for error. The great traditions of folk music of Rajasthan lie on one side. Ben Walsh, a mostly self-taught experimental percussionist who messes around with all kinds of sounds and instruments, on the other. The contrast, superficially, couldn’t be more vivid. By all accounts, this is a collaboration that shouldn’t work.

But it does. The grand synchronised bits give way to a session of jugalbandi , as Walsh and Solanki slow things down, decibel-wise, for a spot of mano-a-mano, de hombre a hombre wizardry. Walsh, who’s sort of ‘directing’ or orchestrating the entire set, starts off with this plastic barrel, a DIY instrument he’s built himself that he plays with sticks. Solanki curls his moustache suggestively. He then follows with an inch-perfect recreation of Walsh’s rhythms, adding — progressively — his own voice on the nagara to the music. In between, he raises each arm alternately, twirling the sticks in his fingers.

That gets the crowd going. People, seated like prim and proper patrons of the arts, appreciators of culture, until now, feel the involuntary urge to get up and walk toward the stage. And jump around or just bounce to the beat. Walsh returns the volley with exaggerated aplomb, switching over to an Indian-sounding beat on his square instrument from before.

There’s humour in their interchange; it’s a routine they’re doing, nailing complex rhythmic patterns effortlessly and egging each other on to add further layers to the sound. There’s impeccable volume control, odd time signatures, funky pockets and buzzing hands. And there’s lots of laughing in the midst of it all.

The next day, I sit down with Ben Walsh in the same open-air courtyard that serves as the main stage. Unlike the night before, the whole place is literally deserted, since there’s a performance happening in a different part of the fort. We’re looking at the stage from the audience seating area, and Maru Tarang — a fusion quartet featuring tabla player Bobby Singh, whom Walsh cites as an old friend, collaborator, and his gateway to Indian music — has just finished with their sound check.

At what point, I wonder, does a music collaboration deteriorate into mindless displays of virtuosity or, to use the far more technical term: wankery? When does it decline into a showcase of skill serving the instrumentalist, and not the music? Where do you draw the line? “You tread very lightly,” responds Walsh to my query. “The worst thing you could do is appear arrogant or like it’s all about you and the other musicians are just in the background. That’s the worst outcome for the audience — or for me. My role was to actually connect with the musicians. In particular, working with folk music, that’s an important thing: To take away the elitism. To take away any kind of musical hierarchy.” The reason the performance resonated, he feels, is because of its intent of creating something truthful. “I think that was the secret ingredient that made the audience react so well. Because it was real. It wasn’t about money, or the spectacle, or showing off. We played real music; it was real truth, heart, and friendship.”

Returning to that square instrument he owns, Walsh tells me about his affinity for collecting “weird instruments when I’m travelling”. He often builds them on his own, but just as often he’ll find something that’s interesting. The thing he’d played was a travelling piccolo Cajon that he’d found in Germany, something that’s “robust” and wouldn’t break while travelling.

Communication of course plays an essential role in giving a sense of honesty and meaning to music, but Walsh explains the nature of collaborations in more ethereal terms. They interacted through “the language of music”. It’s a thought Solanki had brought forth in my conversation with him the previous night as well — “Music is a universal language. There’s only those seven notes everywhere; it’s about who plays them with ‘heart’,” he’d said — and Walsh speaks of how that unsaid connection, and an understanding of each other’s styles, is what adds direction to a collaboration. “These kinds of systems are universal. It’s the language of rhythm. It’s literally like question-and-answer, just like in any form of dialogue.”

Solanki has had several forays into experimental and fusion music, but he also remains firmly entrenched in the traditions of Indian music. Walsh, on the other hand, concedes to the opposite. Explaining his urge to constantly experiment — from his drum wheel to the Gravity Scratch, a way of processing sounds and DJing that he’s come up with — he says it’s very natural. “I don’t have a guru. I’ve sat with different people, heard different music, had little lessons from people. The things I do and the ideas I have, a great deal of them come after being exposed to the world. I don’t have something to rely on, so I wake up every morning deciding what to do. I’m not averse to tradition; I respect it, I understand it, I just don’t have it. In all the ways I’m sad about that, I’m happy to have the freedom to explore, respectfully listen and learn from the sidelines.”

Walsh has had a lot of theatre training as a kid, revealing his one-time aspirations to be an actor, and he’s spent time in the circus as well, in addition to heavy touring and performing experience. That, in a way, informs his ability to channel so much of his energy on stage to the ‘performance’ aspect, the theatrics of it, without quite overdoing it. “I’m not afraid to perform; I enjoy talking on the mic and engaging. You’re on stage, and yeah, it’s music. Fundamentally, that’s what it should be. But if you can do that add a little element, just to let the audience know that, ‘Hey, I’m on stage, you’re watching me,’ and engage with them.”

That energy acts as a kind of cherry on top, especially watching him and Solanki riffing off each other. The realisation that the artistes are having fun on stage — that it’s not rote, mundane and over-rehearsed to the point of tedium — allows the audience to let loose too; and both share this infectious energy that adds layers to the music.

“There was a very serious challenge,” says Walsh, talking about collaborating with Solanki, “and then there was humour. He’s humble and has very little ego for a man of his stature and his calibre. And that came through. The real friendship and the skill of what we’re doing… you could feel it all the way from the back to the front. If people can see something that’s real, they know it. It’s like, human beings are not stupid. Maybe some people feel we can be, or that we are. But they wake up our spirit when something ‘real’ happens. That’s why we go and see things; not to see tired shows proven to be popular. That was a real moment that was created and it can never be repeated.”

Akhil Sood is a freelance writer and musician from New Delhi

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