AAsk these travelling gypsies what their religion is and they will reply in unison — music. Such is their passion for music and they, while blending it with travel, have found a peculiar way to experiment and learn a genre that many bands have not tried out in the country.
The band members of Shanka Tribe travel across India to explore tribal and folk music. And when they gather up for a jamming session, their instruments are tuned to get the best instrumental progressive trance, imbibing music from various cultures in the world. Shanka Tribe has performed in various festivals, including World Mouth Harp Festival, and have also won third place in the Strawberry Field Music Festival held in Bengaluru two years ago. Their next project is to play live for a music programme for a television channel.
Rejoy Jesudas and Munna are the main travel buffs in the band and both have travelled in and out of the country to identify musical instruments that suit their interests and form a band. Both have interesting tales to tell about each of the strange instruments they use.
“It was nearly midnight when I heard a different sound during my stay in a remote village in Manali. When I followed the sound out of curiosity, I found an Australian playing a strange instrument carved out of bamboo. I sat near him for several minutes and when he had finished, I enquired about it. It was an Australian tribal music instrument called Didgeridoo. I spent a couple of days with the traveller and understood how it was made. When I came back home, the first thing I did was to find a hollow wooden piece and make the instrument,” says Rejoy, a Kannur native, who does a variety of jobs from interior designing to carpentry, when he is not playing music and travelling.
After the instrument was made, he set out another journey carrying it to various tourist destinations in India to learn how to play it. “It took almost two years for me to learn how to play it. I spent a lot of time jamming with foreigners and they taught me how to use it during our journeys,” he says.
Buoyed by his experience of mixing travel and learning music, Rejoy went to another interior village in northern India a couple of years later. This time he selected Rajasthan to hunt for Ravanahatha, an ancient bow-string instrument. “I saw a boy selling the instrument in the streets of Pushkar. We talked about the instrument and after sometime, he invited me to his house that looked like a temporary tent in the middle of the desert. I saw there a family, who was employed in the making of Ravanahatha. I stayed there for a couple of days with them learning the instrument and experimenting with it. When I returned, I bought one and we have been using it since then,” he says.
“What we are trying to do is to learn their music and adapt to it our genre. It is a tough task as to master these instruments you need to spend a lot of time. And then to change this to an entirely different form of music, you need lot of patience,” says Rejoy.
Every instrument the tribal band uses has an interesting story of how they found it during their travels. “It is not only the instruments we have found through our travel. We have found our own music. We jam with foreigners, locals and anyone who is interested in music. We interact with people from various societies and this has helped us to grow our exposure. We sometimes jam with tribal people also. Even a solo trip to a jungle is helpful as we tend to learn different sounds of nature and later use it during our jamming. We travel to jam and learn music,” he says.
Munna, who is one of the percussionists in the band, has also travelled abroad to pick peculiar African tribal music instruments. “I have visited global village in Dubai and shopped in the African pavilion just to buy certain instruments. We recently bought an instrument called hang drum from Italy. We saw it during a music festival in Goa. The best thing about travelling is that we can meet people, who use different instruments and learn from them how to use it. Some foreigners put stalls in tourist destinations and sell instruments they collect from other countries. We have collected a variety of flutes used by tribes in different South-Asian countries through this. The main reason we are after the tribal music is because it connects us with the sound of nature,” says Munna, who prefers to use only his first name.
Some of the musical instruments the band uses are Djembe (African), Darbuka (Arabic), Moor Singh (Indian mouth harp), Afro-Shaker, hang drum, Ravanahatha, Makudi, Didgeridoo and Oudh (Arabic).
The band members like to play live rather than record their performance or produce albums. However, they have recently released an album, named Travelling Gypsies in YouTube. The other band members are Nithin, Sreeraj, Libin Noby, Bonny Kalappurackal, Akhin Dev, Joel, Aswin, Jinju Morris and Vishnu.
