★★★☆☆
Ruhaniyat was a bit of a mixed bag. Both Abi Sampa and Rushil Ranjan usually deliver (they are co-founders of the The Orchestral Qawwali Project), and they delivered well again, but nothing that they haven’t done before perhaps.
A new face in the chorus, a female voice which isn’t normally present in the male-dominated genre, introducing a beautiful tone, reflected on by Sampa. We had Jyoti Nooran, who opened the set, if hesitantly, with Manchester Camerata sometimes limping over the beautiful vocals of Jyoti and her chorus. At the end, She brought it back to what she does best, speaking in Punjabi and singing Qawallis, in that we passed curfew as Jyoti was announcing that she wanted to share a few lines of poetry with us. Her mic was cut off and people ran towards her to get an autograph and chat with her as we had ran out if time.
The audience, largely white folk considering how minimal the audience participation was, I think were unsure what to make of Ruhaniyat, perhaps because there is a strong element of audience participation – a rhythmic clapping at minimum I couldn’t feel from the audience I sat with. When Nooran had a call and recall part, those who knew, recalled back (me and my sibling and a good chunk of the right section of the hall). I think parts of Ruhaniyat clarified how it falls flat with certain audiences – when the audience is seeing one musical form which is very clapping-at-the-end-of-performance versus a form of music which initiates clapping, responses, energy during the playing of music.
There may also be misconceptions that Ruhaniyat is an entryway into experiencing Qawalli/Sufi music. It isn’t. All the singers and instrumentalists for Qawalli ask the audience, to a point, to bring some of their knowledge of specifically Qawalli and Sufi music.
When Jyoti first came onstage, I sort of recognised her, but she usually performs in a duo; she felt familiar but I was unsure. She didn’t feel herself fully. At the end of Ruhaniyat, when the audience were applauding, she took a mic and asked whether she should sing again, and Punjabi people from the audience urged her to sing again, in her own style. She took that, sang and spoke standing up, taking song suggestions and urging audiences to sing back to her – I finally recognised her properly. She seemed to have shape-shifted from the first performance into this performance.
Afterwards, I caught up with a friend who’d seen Rushil Ranjan and Abi Sampa’s work at the Royal Albert Hall, and she felt it was different too, if not for the fact that there was a bigger orchestra there. I had seen Abi Sampa and Rushil Ranjan’s work, at the Hallé, an orchestral carnatic exploration named Maya, which felt more harmonised and balanced. I respect this new piece of work, and perhaps it took on an angle which was unfamiliar with Jyoti Nooran.
There was something beautiful still in the lilting Western instruments mired with Sufi emotions and Qawwali music. But there is perhaps something new I would like to see. Indonesian instruments with Qawalli music? Gamalan and Haq? Dum Mast Qalander? Another MIF show, Sounds of the East, was built around Singaporean/South-East Asian music fused with Western. That performance being instruments-based perhaps made it more subtly harmonious than Ruhaniyat, which combined vocals and instruments. It definitely inspired me to seek out music performances which combine different musical cultures.
JADAR 